I don’t know the original source of this, but I think it’s quite old. A reverse image search led to 118 pages of results…
Source: Klaus Zimmerman
I know some people only read Thought Shrapnel and not the rest of my work, so I’m just going to give a quick update to say that the co-op I helped set up 10 years ago, and which has been a source of creative and collaborative inspiration, will be closing on 1st May 2026.
We’re all still friends. I’m going to be working through my consultancy business, Dynamic Skillset so get in touch if I can help you or your organisation!
After ten years of creative cooperation, we’re announcing that We Are Open Co-op (WAO) will close its doors on our 10th birthday: 1st May 2026. This has been a carefully considered, collaborative decision — the kind we’ve always tried to model as a co-op.
But, as you can imagine, we’re a bit emotional about it, and it also feels a bit weird to finally say it out loud and in public.
WAO is a strong, well-respected brand. We continue to have wonderful clients, meaningful work and good relationships with each other. People are finally waking up to the idea that flat hierarchies and consent-driven businesses are the future.
In some ways, this is a continuation rather than an ending, as we’ll be carrying forward the cooperative principles we’ve practised into new systems and relationships.
Source: WAO blog
Image: CC BY-ND Visual Thinkery for WAO
I’m too young for memories of the original game on the Commodore 64, but I do remember the SEGA Master System version of Spy vs. Spy. While I wasn’t allowed to have a console myself, I would play on friends' devices. The thing I really remember, though, is my parents leaving me to play for a while which was on a demo unit in Fenwick’s toy department in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It was a game in which you, as either the ‘black’ or ‘white’ spy had to outwit the other spy.
This homely introduction serves to explain the graphic accompanying both this post and the one I’ve take it from — an extremely clear-eyed view of what “agentic commerce” means for brands. Usually, this kind of thing wouldn’t interest me, but I do like clear thinking on things orthogonal to my line of work.
Let’s start with the setup, which involves a post on an influential blog which was more “speculative fiction” than “investor advice”:
For context: Citrini Research is a financial analysis firm focused on thematic investing research with a highly influential Substack. The piece in question, published this past Sunday, is a fictional macro memo written from June 2028, narrating the fallout of what they call the “human intelligence displacement spiral” – a negative feedback loop in which AI capabilities improve rapidly, leading to mass white collar layoffs, spending decreases, margins tightening, companies buying more AI, accelerating the loop. It’s all a “scenario, not a prediction,” and not really all that new: the idea that a (unit of AI capex spend) < (unit of disposable income) circulating in the real economy has been doing the rounds for a while now. Yet Citrini caused a very real market selloff earlier this week. Apparently this scenario wasn’t priced in.
What the smart people at NEMESIS point out is that our current neoliberal version of capitalism in advanced service-based economies has “built a rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations” as “[m]ost people accept a bad price to avoid more clicks or cognitive labor [with] brand familiarity substituting for diligence.”
In Citrini’s scenario, AI agents dismantle this layer entirely. They price-match across platforms, re-shop insurance renewals, assemble travel itineraries, route around interchange fees etc. Agents don’t mind doing the things we find tedious.
Basically what Citrini is describing as the destruction of habitual intermediation is, from the POV of Nemesis HQ, a description of one of the primary economic functions of brands dissolving.
Essentially, brands “reduce the friction of decision-making” because it’s a shortcut to buying more of what you know you like. There’s a reason I’ve got three Patagonia hoodies, four Gant jumpers, and all of my t-shirts are from THG. But what happens when an agent which knows your preferences can go off and do your shopping for you? Book your holiday? Organise your insurance renewals?
In Citrini’s 2028 world of agentic commerce, brand loyalty is nothing but a tax. When given license to do so, the agent doesn’t care about your favorite app or branded commodity, feel the pull of a well-designed checkout UX flow or default to the app your thumb navigates to the easiest on your home screen. It evaluates every option on price, fit, speed, or whatever other parameters you’ve set. The entire edifice of brand preference built over decades of advertising, design and behavioral psychology becomes, from the agent’s perspective, noise.
Though its not a wholesale “end of brands” it is a catastrophe for every business whose moat is made of friction. And a remarkable number of moats are made pretty much of only friction (think: insurance, financial services, telecom, energy, SaaS, most platforms, Big Grocery, airlines, cars, etc.). Generally speaking, this is a good thing (creative destruction!), and frees the labor of large swaths of branding and marketing professionals to societally more useful ends.
What I think scares people is uncertainty. I probably have a higher tolerance for different forms of ambiguity than most people I know. Well, cognitively, at least; sometimes the body keeps the score.
Source & image: NEMESIS
Good stuff from Jay Springett, who also links to a 60-page PDF called Paying Attention that I… haven’t paid attention to (yet!)
The attention economy rewards the same behaviours regardless of whether the content being spread is a coordinated disinformation campaign or a genuinely interesting essay. The platform does not distinguish between the two. It just measures the engagement.
There is a practical implication buried somewhere in the above though I think.
That if the first units of attention are the ones that change behaviour most, then being liberal with the like button actually matters. dLeaving a comment, sharing a post, replying to something you found worthwhile are small acts that actually work. In the face of “the firehose” the modest counter-move is to be deliberate about where your attention goes, and cultivating the things that you want to see more of.
This is interesting when juxtaposed with something Nita Farahany says in the transcript of a conversation posted on The Exponential View:
This gets at a fundamental question about what it means to act autonomously. Are you acting in a way consistent with your own desires, or are you being steered by somebody else’s desires? There’s very little we do these days that is steered by our own desires.
I’m teaching a class this semester at Duke on mental privacy, advanced topics in AI law and policy. I ran an attention audit on my students. They recorded how many times they picked up their devices over three days, and what they spent their attention on. Day one: record it, don’t change your behaviour. Day two: no apps that algorithmically steer you — which meant basically nothing was allowed. Day three: do whatever you want, record it again. Day two was remarkable. Somebody read a book. They couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that. These are students. Someone finished a puzzle they’d been convinced they didn’t have time for. And day three? Worse than day one. Utterly sucked back in.
I was flicking back through my notebook, which I have not used enough in the last 18 months or so, and came across a note I’d made while reading Oliver Burkeman’s excellent book Four Thousand Weeks. He quotes Harry Frankfurt as saying that our devices distract us from more important matters — it’s as if we let what they show us define what counts as “important”. As such, our capacity to “want what we want to want” is sabotaged.
Sources:
Image: Marcus Spiske
Well these, by Michael Pederson, are delightful.
Source: Colossal
👋 A reminder that I’ve been on holiday this week, so no Thought Shrapnel.
However, I’ve still been saving things to my Are.na channels if you’d like to peruse those…
– Doug
As explained in this post, Tom Watson and I are putting together an offer to help organisations with their digital sovereignty.
Sign up if you’re interested in joining our first cohort. No obligation.
You cannot manage what you cannot see. Most organisations operate in a fog of invisible reliance; you rely on platforms that obscure their workings behind slick interfaces and terms you never read.
TechFreedom helps you clear the air. We give you the tools to look past Big Tech’s version of the Cloud and build a digital infrastructure that is open, visible, and under your control.
Source: techfreedom.eu
Jo Hutchinson reshared this on LinkedIn a few days ago, and I wanted to save/share my comments on it. The original post was by Tricia Riddell, a Professor of Applied Neuroscience and includes a short video. In it, she talks about there being “a range of authentic selves” that people can bring to a situation rather than a single “authentic self.”
Riddell wonders whether this is what leads to imposter syndrome, which is usually suffered by high-achievers. “You cannot feel like an imposter,” she says, “unless there is something you believe you’re failing to live up to.”
My response, because it’s easier for me to re-find things here rather than on social media:
As someone who suffers from imposter syndrome most days of my life, it resonates.
I am, though, reminded of something that John Bayley wrote in one of the biographies of his wife, the philosopher Iris Murdoch. He said that Iris believed that she “didn’t have a strong sense of self.” I’ve thought about this over two decades, and I think it maps onto what’s being discussed here.
On the one hand, you could say that those with a strong sense of self want to bring a single “authentic” self to every situation. Which, as Tricia Riddell points out, would mean that they’re not bringing other stories into the situation.
Or, on the other hand, you might say that those without a strong sense of self have a fragmented view of themselves. The imposter syndrome is the price that is paid for an integrated sense of self.
I haven’t figured it out yet, but I find the whole thing fascinating.
Source: LinkedIn
Image: Amy Vann
Most of this post talks about the differences between Japan and Italy, which makes it well worth reading in full. What I like about it, though, is that it goes beyond “mental models” to talk about framings and how these are the unseen, and somewhat hidden things that make cultures different. Fascinating.
A mental model is a simulation of “how things might unfold”, and we all build and rebuild hundreds of mental models every day. A framing, on the other hand, is “what things exist in the first place”, and it is much more stable and subtle. Every mental model is based on some framing, but we tend to be oblivious to which framing we’re using most of the time […].
Framings are the basis of how we think and what we are even able to perceive, and they’re the most consequential thing that spreads through a population in what we call “culture”.
[…]
Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist and play a role in mental models—that arose in those same arbitrary but self-reinforcing ways. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of Our Success, brings up several studies demonstrating the cultural differences in framings.
He mentions studies that estimated the average IQ of Americans in the early 1800’s to have been around 70—not because they were dumber, but because their culture at the time was much poorer in sophisticated concepts. Their framings had fewer and less-defined moving parts, which translated into poorer mental models. Other studies found that children in Western countries are brought up with very general and abstract categories for animals, like “fish” and “bird”, while children in small-scale societies tend to think in terms of more specific categories, such as “robin” and “jaguar”, leading to different ways to understand and interface with the world.
But framings affect more than understanding. They influence how we take in the information from the world around us.
Source: Aether Mug
Image: Maksym Tymchyk
This post on the blog of the American Philosophical Association (APA) talks about political epistemology. Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina and argues that the reason presenting people with facts doesn’t change their political opinions is due to our social identities.
This resonates with me more than the usual framing where in which we’re told that we need to appeal to people’s emotions. Social identity makes much more sense, and so (as Bagg argues) the way out of this mess isn’t to “ensure every citizen employs optimal epistemic practices” but instead to strengthen our “broadly reliable collective practices.”
I’ve often said that one of the reasons for Brexit was the [attack on expertise by Michael Gove]9www.ft.com/content/3…). Attacking institutions which are proxies through which people can know and understand the world is corrosive, divisive, and ultimately, a cynically populist move.
On the individual level, we are right to worry about the epistemic impact of motivated reasoning, cognitive biases, and “political ignorance.” And at the systemic level, we are right to lament the rise of talk radio, cable news, social media, and the attention economy, along with the corresponding decline of local news, professional journalism, content standards, and so on. Trends in our political economy have indeed conspired with underlying human frailties to undermine the epistemic foundations of a stable and functioning democracy—even in its most minimal form.
Yet this diagnosis is also crucially incomplete, in ways that distort our search for solutions. When we understand the problem in epistemic terms, we naturally seek epistemic answers: better fact-checking, more deliberation, better education, greater media balance. We aim to develop the “civic” and “epistemic virtues” of unbiased, fair-minded citizens. And indeed, such projects are surely worth pursuing. The epistemic failures they aim to address have deeper roots in our political psychology, however—and overcoming them requires grappling with those roots more directly.
In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short. More than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.
[…]
We do not generally decide which groups to identify with on the basis of their epistemic credentials regarding political questions. And even if we were to use such a standard, our judgments about which groups satisfy it would be inescapably colored by our pre-existing identities, formed on other bases or inherited from childhood. Developing certain “epistemic virtues” may mitigate some of our blind spots, finally, but it is hubris to think anyone can escape such biases entirely. Like it or not, it is a basic fact of human cognition that we think and act politically as members of social groups.
[…]
The trouble is not that reliable collective truth-making practices no longer exist, but that significant portions of the population no longer trust them—and that as a result, the truths they establish no longer constrain those in power.
[…]
What best explains contemporary epistemic failures… is not the decay of individual epistemic virtues, but the growing chasm between reliable collective truth-making practices and the social identities embraced by large numbers of people. And as a result, the only feasible way out of the mess we are in is not to ensure every citizen employs optimal epistemic practices, but to weaken their social identification with cranks and conspiracy theorists, and strengthen their identification with the broadly reliable collective practices of science, scholarship, journalism, law, and so on. The most visible manifestations of the problem might be epistemic, in other words, but its roots lie in social identity. And the most promising solutions will therefore tackle those roots.
Source: Blog of the APA
Image: Steve Johnson
In the wake of Big Tech propping up Trump’s increasingly authoritarian regime, European countries and organisations are taking seriously the issue of digital sovereignty.
This initiative from the French didn’t spring out of nowhere — their Open Source Docs offering was something I experimented with last year — but they’ve now got ‘La Suite’ which offers more. The site is, probably entirely intentionally only in French (of which I only have a schoolboy understanding) so I translated their About page.
It’s pretty awesome that they’re a co-op, that they see digital technology as political (which of course it is), and that they want to contribute to the digital commons 🤘
A political ambition
Digital technology is political. The choice of our creation and collaboration tools can either perpetuate the captive income of proprietary publishers or support open source alternatives that set us free. This choice comes at a price: most organisations do not have the means to design tailor-made tools or manage their own free software instances.
With LaSuite.coop, we are creating a modular offering to enable associations, cooperatives, social and solidarity economy enterprises, institutions and universities to equip themselves with the best open source solutions and be supported by dedicated teams. A world is dying, and this project is our contribution to the future that is being built thanks to the actions of all these organisations.
A model for contributing to the commons
To compete in the long term with proprietary software financed by venture capital and its quest for hegemony and profitability, we want every LaSuite.coop application to be based on a true digital commons. That is to say, free software developed, financed and governed in an open and transparent manner by a plurality of public and private actors. The Decidim project and the French government’s digital suite are among our main sources of inspiration.
With LaSuite.coop, we donate a portion of our revenue to the communities that maintain and develop the software we offer. In this way, we contribute directly to a virtuous and resilient circle of mutualisation and collective decision-making.
A cooperative venture
The organisations behind LaSuite.coop have been committed to promoting free and democratic digital technology since their inception. We pool our years of complementary experience in hosting, development, technical project management, training and strategic consulting.
Source: La Suite
A rare cross-post for me from my Open Thinkering blog. I’m really rather pleased with this and would like you to read it.
Source: Open Thinkering
I’ve been using Claude Opus 4.6 over the last couple of weeks, and let me tell you: it feels like digging with a SHOVEL.
Source: Are.na
While I expected studying Philosophy as an undergraduate to be personally useful and indirectly useful to my professional career, I didn’t forsee how relevant it would be to our increasingly AI-infused world.
In this post, Matt Mandel, after “[coming] to realize that using LLMs is pushing all of us to more closely examine our philosophical assumptions” has sketched out “a rough attempt at laying out what in philosophy is most relevant for AI.”
I’ve taken the list — covering things with which I’m familiar and those things I’d like to follow-up on — and added links. The “What is agency?" section is particularly timely, as I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently but need to do more reading.
Part 1: Philosophical Concepts
What is a mind?
- Nagel, What is it like to be a bat
- Chalmers, Facing up to the problem of consciousness
- Putnam, The Nature of Mental States
- Searle, Minds, Brains, and Programs
What is agency?
- Anscombe, Intention
- Dennett, The Intentional Stance
- Bratman, Shared Cooperative Activity
- Applbaum, Legitimacy (group agents)
Who has moral status?
- Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (indirect duties)
- Singer, Animal Liberation
- Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures
What are reasons and values?
- Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
- Parfit, On What Matters (Volume II, Part 6)
- Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong
- Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity
Part 2: How should we build AI
How might AIs come to implement our values?
- Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language
- Bostrom, The Superintelligent Will
- Plato, The Republic (Book I)
- Anthropic, Emergent Misalignment
How should AI be involved in governance?
- Applbaum, Legitimacy (“domination by a stone”)
- Séb Krier, Coasean Bargaining at Scale
- Newsom, Snell v United Specialty Insurance Company (concurrence)
- Cass Sunstein and Vermeule, Law and Leviathan
How might AI impact human flourishing?
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
- Mill, On Liberty
- Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person
- Brendan McCord, Live by the Claude, Die by the Claude
How do we find meaning in a post-AGI world?
- Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Philosophy and the Meaning of Life)
- Bostrom, Deep Utopia
- Mandel, The Top Three AGI-Proof Careers and What They Reveal About Our Humanity and The Future
In terms of Part 1, to the What is a mind? section it’s definitely worth adding Turing’s foundational paper from 1950 asking “can machines think?” It’s the one that introduces the “Turing test” and directly sets up the questions that Searle and Nagel are responding to.
I’d also add a section entitled What is knowledge? and include:
I had to ask Perplexity for help with Part 2. I haven’t read any of these but apparently they’re relevant additions:
Source: Substack Notes
Image: Hanna Barakat
As Jan Muehlig posted on LinkedIn recently, a machine-first internet looks quite different from a human-first one. For a start, when people are using AI agents to get things done — find and book holidays, compare and contrast political manifestos, various work-related things — they don’t need to be accessing pretty websites.
This post begins by talking about 13 Markdown files which apparently wiped $285 billion off the valuations of publicly-traded technology companies. Markdown files are just text files and, in this case, were part of a “knowledge work plugin” for Claude Code which just gives it more context. As I’ve already discussed artificial general intelligence is already here — it’s just in AI companies' best interests to point to it being some thing to worry about in future.
I’ve probably got more to write about this, specifically about how a future beyond the web browser and apps looks like accessing your digital world via two dominant AI companies. I’m definitely not saying that’s a good thing, that’s just the trajectory we’re on currently.
So what does agentic-first software look like? Initially I thought we would see people replace SaaS tools (intentionally or not) with their home grown versions. While that’s definitely true, the improvement in agentic harnesses and the underlying models have meant that I think there’s a whole new category ready to emerge.
Effectively, API first solutions for each vertical. These are products built from the ground up to allow programmatic access - instead of the other way round where the UI is the main feature and API access is a checkbox on their feature list.
This means really thinking through the most flexible way to offer access to data. It also means generous and fast API access to it, along with access and permissions to control and secure it at scale.
This isn’t actually a new concept - we’ve had so-called “headless” CMSs and ecommerce platforms before AI came along. But I now think we’ll see an explosion of them.
Source: Martin Alderson
Image: Deborah Lupton
There are two types of people in life: those who make binary statements, and those who don’t.
But seriously, the older I get the more it feels l like there are some people who I’m drawn to who share certain qualities. A lot those qualities are described this this this post by Dave Kang outlining his Octopus Manifesto. The “octopus” part comes from having different “tentacles” focused on different things.
It’s been over a year now that I’ve been living the Octopus Way, and my thinking around this has evolved somewhat. When I first began this journey post-sabbatical, an octopus was just a more fun way to describe a generalist, polymath, or multi-whatever person.
But lately I’ve been wanting to draw the circle a little tighter, as I think Octopus People are actually a smaller subset of this group. One of the fun things about making up your own identity metaphor is you get to define the term. So in this edition I present my updated, tighter definition of an Octopus Person. I’m interested in finding my unique tribe of people, and I hope clarifying and narrowing my definition will help me specifically find more people who are in the same boat as me.
Without quoting paragraphs and paragraphs, here’s the first sentence of each of the numbered points on the manifesto:
Source: Dave Kang’s Octopus Life
Image: Julia Kadel
Source: Are.na
A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.
(Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile)
I no doubt shared this when I first read it, but I had reason recently to re-find this excellent post from Milan Cvitkovic containing a list of “things you’re allowed to do.”
Brewing in my mind is a longer post over at my main blog about what it means to have agency, and how to develop it in yourself and others. It’s not a fixed state, but something which fluctuates over time. It needs feeding, sometimes by giving yourself permission to just do things.
This is a list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you weren’t, or didn’t even know you could.
I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are (especially the free ones).
Note that you can replace “hire” or “buy” with “barter for” or “find a DIY guide to” nearly everywhere below. E.g. you can clean the bathroom in exchange for your housemate doing a couple hours’ research for you.
Source: milan.cvitkovic.net
Image: Are.na
I like experimenting with AI tools, but as I mentioned in a recent post about the Claude Constitution, I’m not a huge fan of the governance behind them. I also get for those in the creative arts, and especially for those for whom AI has arrived midway through their career, the whole “innovation” feels like armageddon.
This post from Andrew Sempere “artist, designer, developer and internet old” starts off with a heartfelt note about how he is desperately looking for work, which lends a appropriately melancholy vibe to what follows. Having really struggled this time last year, both in terms of work and life in general, I really feel for him.
It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here’s an extended excerpt, because he’s not wrong. But what can we salvage from the ruins? What can we create together?
To the extent that any of these AIs “think” at all, it’s because the models have strip-mined the last two decades of internet conversation. The conversation that we used to have in public. All of the blog posts, commentary, free software and detailed debates, RFCs and white papers. Free documentation and APIs and Stack Overflow posts. And now, as far as we can tell, this collective generative activity has almost completely ceased to be.
We have stopped talking to each other on the open channels.
We don’t “need” to anymore.
We definitely don’t want to anymore.
The current moment is so incredibly extractive, it has converted every ounce of human care, kindness and creativity into a “model,” which we then burn as much fossil fuel as possible to convert into a subscription service. We are being asked to pay for a chopped-and-screwed memory of the time we used to live in a semi-functional society.
We are, effectively, being fracked to death. And this isn’t an impending collapse, it’s already happened, we’re just living out the consequences right now.
It’s not the internet that’s dead, it’s the entire tech industry and it wasn’t an accident, it was a murder to try and cash in on the life insurance money. We’re not into late-stage capitalism, we’re fully in The Jackpot, and I fear nothing will ever get any better than it was about two years ago, when we ingested the entire program into itself and then just… gave up… trading all of our living friends for their ghosts.
It seems increasingly likely that we’re locked in a death-cult-groundhog-day timeloop now, forever, remixing only hit-parade records from 2023 again and again and again and again and again until we’re convinced they’re new.
I almost miss the era when there was a shitty startup every week.
[…]
I have memories. Vivid ones, of living in a different country, a different city, a different planet. I look at screenshots and photographs of life from as little as 18 months ago and it becomes difficult to believe that future ever existed. I don’t even feel right in my body, nothing seems to work, everything previously solid seems damaged, unstable, treacherous and unreliable. Things have glitched, gone sideways, completely wrong timeline. I’m told I’m wrong, that things are fine, that this is normal. We’ve always been this way.
So this might be just old-man shit, but I think the word I’m looking for is: bereft.
Source & image: Feral Research
My one week of rest to give my autonomic system a break turned into two as, predictably, I caught whatever lurgy my daughter brought home from school. Two weeks away from exercise provided a bit of a reset, and I felt much better.
It reminds me of this excellent podcast episode.
Source: Tumblr
I’m pretty sure I’ve come across anytype before, but I was reminded of it after asking for suggestions in the Freelancers Get Sh*t Done Slack. I’ve been using Google Tasks, which are nicely integrated with Google Calendar, for the last few years.
While I can still do that for my co-op to-do’s, I need a different solution for my consultancy business, which I’ve switched to Proton. Lots of people use pen and paper, but I need the ability to includes clickable links, etc.
While anytype is way more than just a tasks app, I do like the way it’s end-to-end encrypted, European, and the kind of Notion alternative I might actually use. I shall be experimenting…
Source: anytype
One of our recurring biases is assuming that our last experience of something, or somewhere, still reflects how it is today. For example, places I haven’t visited in over a decade, since before the pandemic, are almost certainly quite different now. The same applies to software and digital tools, which tend to evolve far faster than we expect.
The same is true of software and digital tools, which often evolve much faster than we think. If you haven’t been playing with AI tools (especially things like Cursor and Claude Code) then you really don’t know what you’re missing out on.
This post was shared with me by Tom Watson, who I did some noodling with on Friday in-person (I know, I know). I like the honest reflections in this post, and it meshes with my own experience building things with the help of a Little Robot Friend.
Within a few minutes of installing Cursor and setting up a handful of developmental studs, I had built a working prototype. Within 24 hours, I not only had a polished app; I was already at the limit of my initial idea, no longer just manufacturing what had been in my head, but trying to come up with new things to manifest. And within 48 hours, I was ruined. The comfortable physics that I thought governed Silicon Valley—that stuff takes time to build; that products need to be designed before they can be created; that computers cannot assume intent or interpolate their way through incomplete ideas—broke, utterly. It all worked too well, too fast.2 I was staggered, drunk on the Kool-Aid and high on the pills, unwell and off-brand. I knew that anyone can now build vibe-coded toys; I did not know that people with a basic familiarity with code could go much, much further.
Though it’s hard to benchmark how far I got in two days, this is my best guess: The app is roughly equivalent to what a designer and a couple professional engineers could build in a month or two. Granted, I didn’t build any of the scaffolding that a real company would—proper signup pages, hardened security policies, administrative features, “tests”—but the product expresses its core functionality as completely as any prototype that we showed Mode’s early investors and first customers. In 2013, it took us eight people, nine months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build something we could sell, and that was seen as reasonably efficient. Today, that feels possible to do with one person in two days.
Well, with one more caveat. Because I learned a second thing at the end of my two days of vertigo: That my idea was terrible.
The entire conceit didn’t work. My long-loved thesis, when rendered on a screen, was catastrophically bad.3 I did not want to start a business around my app. I did not want to take notes in my app. I did not want to use my app. I wanted to start over.4 Great chefs can come from anywhere, but not everyone can be a great chef.
Equally interesting is this bit, which talks about what happens when people don’t have to accept the “solutions” created by people who don’t experience their problems:
In other words, a lot of today’s technology is the levered ideas of technologists. It is a book store, run by an engineer from a hedge fund; it is computerized cash registers, from a social media founder and Oracle employees; it is fitness classes, built by a Bain consultant and an MIT grad; it is a note-taking app, built by someone who knows enough Typescript to build a note-taking app. But if these products succeed, it’s often more because of the technology than the idea of the technologist. It’s not that the idea was bad; it’s that the idea was not the transformational advantage. A fine CAD program beats a drafting table. A fine banking app beats driving to a branch. Even my app beats hand-written note cards. And because people who are technologists first, and architects or bankers or writers second, are the only people who can lever their ideas with technology, their ideas win.
Moreover, this isn’t just some accidental selection bias; this is the whole point of Silicon Valley. Flagship incubators like Y Combinator are built on the thesis that a smart kid with a computer and summer internship at Goldman Sachs can outwit all of American Express. That’s not because the kid understands the needs of payment processors better than people at American Express, or has better ideas than they do; it’s because the kid can build their idea.
But what if anyone can? What if lots of people at American Express can build stuff? What if someone who’s been an architect for twenty years can make the design software they’ve always wanted? What if a veteran investment banker can write a program that automatically generates pitch books? What if a real writer makes a note-taking app? What if software is the levered ideas of experts?
Source: benn.substack
Image: Kevin Ku
Whether or not you use LLMs as part of your workflow, you don’t want to be accused of “sounding like AI”. This guide gives a list of words and phrases that are (much) more commonly used in the output from LLMs. I’ve added it my document of AI words/phases to avoid. You’re welcome.
These words and phrases are ranked based on the frequency they appear in AI documents, compared to human documents in our research of 3.3 million texts.
Source: GPTzero
It’s always worth looking at what governments decide to publish when the public are busy looking the other way. Recently, Trump’s actions around Greenland have been in the news, and so the UK government though it would be a good time to publish this.
It’s only 14 pages long and easily scannable, but TL;DR: “Significant disruption to international markets as a result of ecosystem degradation or collapse will put UK food security at risk."
This assessment is an analysis of how global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse could affect UK national security.
It shows how environmental degradation can disrupt food, water, health and supply chains, and trigger wider geopolitical instability. It identifies 6 ecosystems of strategic importance for the UK and explores how their decline could drive cascading global impacts.
This assessment, which was developed by analysts and experts across HM Government, supports long-term resilience planning. Publishing the assessment highlights opportunities for innovation, green finance and global partnerships that can drive growth while safeguarding the ecosystems that underpin our collective security and prosperity.
Source: GOV.UK
This looks interesting. It’s from Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency and their website has lots of interesting stuff on it.
In an age defined by rapid information flows and shifting security landscapes, the resilience of societies rests not only on military strength or technological capacity, but equally on the ability of individuals and institutions to withstand psychological influence and manipulation. Psychological defence is therefore not merely a technical field, it is a civic responsibility and a cornerstone of democratic resilience.
This textbook is the first of its kind: a comprehensive overview of key issues related to psychological defence and information influence written by leading scholars on each topic. The textbook is an anthology with contributions reflecting the broad debate in Sweden and it provides knowledge, practical guidance, and reflection on how psychological defence can be understood and applied in different contexts. It explores the threats we face – such as disinformation and propaganda – and the tools available to counter them, ranging from critical thinking and communication strategies to institutional preparedness.
The overarching aim of this book is not only to raise awareness of psychological threats, but also to empower readers with the knowledge and confidence to respond effectively and responsibly. By fostering trust, openness, and critical engagement, psychological defence contributes to safeguarding the values of free and democratic societies.
Source: Psychological Defence Agency
As someone who has done a lot of thinking about community spaces over the years, I like this investigation into what we mean when we use environmental analogies for online communities. It seems like it’s the start of a research project, and there’s a call for people to get in touch with the author.
The metaphor of online communities that “have become toxic” or that are “being polluted” in different ways is a common one. But what do we mean when we talk about pollution and toxicity in online spaces; and what can we learn from the environmental sciences and natural ecosystems to improve things with and for communities?
[…]
Websites solely based around machine generated content are proliferating, polluting both search engines and journalism, crowding our human-generated, high-quality journalism. The analogy of pollution that many of these communities and maintainers refer to seems like an apt one. It even predates the launch of generative AI systems that currently are the focus of this “digital pollution”: The related environmental concept of toxicity is a staple when discussing how people interact in online communities, references to which go back to at least the early 2000s. And more recently, people have argued that social media companies themselves should be viewed as potential polluters of society and how our information is being polluted.
[…]
[T]he goal of the “digital pollution” framing is not to call individual community participants or types of online cultures per se as toxic or polluted. Instead, it can serve to understand how online ecosystems can suffer, despite lots of well-intentioned and well-meaning interactions. Understanding these pollution dynamics is not just of academic interest, it might also help with modeling online interactions. Which in turn can help design interventions that have the potential to support moderators and improve online communities.
If we look at “pollution” more closely, in which ways do different factors in “commons pollution” mirror environmental pollution? Firstly, both environmental pollution and digital pollution can come in different shapes and forms. If we just think of water pollution, we have point source pollution, in which a single, identifiable source such as a factory discharges harmful materials into bodies of water. Online, we can find similar “point sources” in targeted misinformation campaigns, run by humans or bots.
Source: Citizens and Tech Lab
Image: Dan Meyers
The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal. This will lead us to the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands… . The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, … this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs. Consequently you sin against incapacity. But incapacity exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it, or shout it down.
— Carl Jung
I only post a small selection of the things I bookmark here on Thought Shrapnel. As ever when I’m not sure about how to organise things, when I started using Are.na again, I just put everything in a single “Finds” channel.
Now that I’ve been using it for a few months, I decided it was high time I was a bit more organised. So I’ve defined some channels and included them with “Finds” for ease of finding.
Note that Are.na allows you to subscribe to any of these in the app — or via RSS by appending /feed/rss to the end of any channel.
Source: Are.na
Oh good, it’s not just me who thinks about these things. Ambiguity is a fundamental part of how we interact with each other and with our devices. And it’s very rarely discussed in general, and certainly not part of the stories we read, watch, or listen to — except as a plot device.
These days, when I watch movies with voice interfaces or “AI” assistants in them, I find myself pretty surprised by how many fictional worlds seem to be full of people who never experience any ambiguity about whether they’re talking to a person or to software. Everyone in a sci-fi setting has usually fully internalized the rules about what is or isn’t “real” in their conversational world, and they usually all have a social script for how they’re “supposed” to treat AI voice assistants.
Characters in modern film and TV are almost never rude or cruel to voice assistants except in scenes where they’re being misunderstood by voice recognition. People in stories like these rarely ever get confused about whether something is a human or an AI unless that’s, like, the entire point of the story. But in real life, we’re constantly forced to interact with an unwanted voice UI, or a phone scammer voice that’s pretending to be real. I have found myself really missing moments like these in movies, where humans express any material awareness of the false voices they interact with. Who made their voice assistant? How do they feel about that company or person? Are they ever tricked by a voice that is false when they expected it to be a real, live human?
[…[
I still haven’t seen much media that reflects the way I actually feel about conversational interfaces in the real world - frustrated, tricked, manipulated, and inconvenienced. And I haven’t seen any media at all recently about the equally insidious trend of real human labor being marketed as if it is an autonomous system.
Source: Laura Michet’s Blog
Image: Jelena Kostic
This was shared with me by Tom Watson yesterday, and we discussed it briefly as part of our now-regular Friday ‘noodling’ sessions. Now, fair enough, one would not expect that turning off ChatGPT’s data consent option would delete files on your own computer.
But then, not having backups is, at the very least, cavalier when your livelihood depends on your outputs. So it’s a reminder not only that LLMs are simultaneously very powerful and ‘stupid’ but also that, just like every other time in the history of digital devices you should have backups.
None of us are perfect. This week, for example, after setting a ‘duress’ password on my GrapheneOS-powered smartphone, I accidentally triggered it and all of my data was instantly wiped. Did I blame GrapheneOS? No, I was actually thankful that it did what it said it would do. I blamed myself.
While I lost some history of my chats in Signal it was a reminder that they’ve got an encrypted cloud backup option. So I turned that on, and didn’t write an article blaming everyone except myself.
This was not a case of losing random notes or idle chats. Among my discussions with ChatGPT were project folders containing multiple conversations that I had used to develop grant applications, prepare teaching materials, refine publication drafts and design exam analyses. This was intellectual scaffolding that had been built up over a two-year period.
We are increasingly being encouraged to integrate generative AI into research and teaching. Individuals use it for writing, planning and teaching; universities are experimenting with embedding it into curricula. However, my case reveals a fundamental weakness: these tools were not developed with academic standards of reliability and accountability in mind.
If a single click can irrevocably delete years of work, ChatGPT cannot, in my opinion and on the basis of my experience, be considered completely safe for professional use. As a paying subscriber (€20 per month, or US$23), I assumed basic protective measures would be in place, including a warning about irreversible deletion, a recovery option, albeit time-limited, and backups or redundancy.
OpenAI, in its responses to me, referred to ‘privacy by design’ — which means that everything is deleted without a trace when users deactivate data sharing. The company was clear: once deleted, chats cannot be recovered, and there is no redundancy or backup that would allow such a thing (see ‘No going back’). Ultimately, OpenAI fulfilled what they saw as a commitment to my privacy as a user by deleting my information the second I asked them to.
Source: Nature Briefing
Image: Ujesh Krishnan
This is a must-read from Andrea Pitzer. As she points out, the window of opportunity to do something about what’s happening in the US is closing.
I’ve looked at mass civilian detention around the world. I’ve visited the facilities where people were held. I’ve talked to the people involved—those detained and tortured, those who supported camps, and those who stood idly by. It’s critical to recognize that each of the societies that has had camps underwent a lengthy process. This process is often easier to see happening in your own country if you first look at an example in another one.
My goal today is to warn you that the U.S. has already been seized by the same camp dynamic. It’s not that I’m trying to tell you that bad things are coming, and you have to look out for them. What I’m saying is that the camps have already taken root and are on a fast-track to get exponentially worse. We’re already deep inside the process.
Yet there is power in that knowledge, because in some big ways, we can know what will happen next. We have models for how other societies have moved out of our current perilous state. And we have a ton of tactics we can use to fight back against the expanding harm directed at all of us.
I’ll add right up front that nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.
[…]
[I]f we count the Biden administration as simply a pause on the larger Trump authoritarian agenda in several ways, the U.S. is currently approaching the end of that three-to-five year window. We may already be living in a concentration-camp regime, but it hasn’t yet hardened into the kind of vast system that becomes the controlling factor in the country’s political future.
Still, we’re on the verge of entrenching a massive system, which is a very bad place to be. It’s my opinion that we have a limited window in which to act. What happens this year will be critical for significantly dismantling the existence of and any future capacity for building the extrajudicial camp network the government is constructing today.
Again, we need to do more than stop the construction of additional facilities, more than just get ICE agents to behave more politely. We need to dismantle the current system and remove the possibility for it to exist again. In my opinion, that is what “Abolish ICE” should mean.
[…]
You can’t reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most U.S. citizens—particularly white ones—have the freedom to act, for now, with far less risk than the many people currently targeted.
Source: Degenerate Art
Image: Bradley Andrews
I was talking with Laura about how full-time jobs are pretty much over as a construct. There aren’t as many as there used to be, particularly for knowledge workers, and there’s plenty of people (like us!) who wouldn’t want one in any case.
This time last year I was laughing at the prediction that AI would be able to replace developers. Now I’m vibe coding actually useful software from scratch. AGI is kinda already here. What does that mean in practice? Probably that the world as we know it is slowly going to disappear.
Most people met AI in late 2022 or something, poked ChatGPT once like it was a digital fortune cookie, got a mediocre haiku about their cat, and decided: ah yes, cute toy, overhyped, wake me when it’s Skynet. Then they went back to their inbox rituals.
They have no idea what’s happening now.
They haven’t seen the latest models that quietly chew through documents, write code, design websites, summarize legal contracts, and generate decent strategy decks faster than a middle manager can clear their throat.
Claude just released a “coworker”, which sometime next year will become your new colleague, and then after that year, your replacement.
[…]
We can automate away huge chunks of the drudgery that used to be biologically unavoidable.
And we’re still out here proudly defending the 40-hour week like it’s some sacred law of physics. Still tying healthcare, housing, and dignity to whether you can convince someone that your job should exist for another quarter.
[…]
So yes, we need a transition, and it will be messy.
We will need new rhythms for days and weeks that aren’t defined by clocking in.
We will need new institutions of community—not offices, but workshops, labs, studios, clubs, care centers, gardens, research guilds, whatever—places where humans gather to do things that matter without a boss breathing down their neck for quarterly results.
We will need new ways to recognize status: not “job title and salary,” but contribution, curiosity, care, creativity.
We will need economic architecture: universal basic income, or even better, universal basic services (housing, healthcare, education, mobility) that are not held hostage by employers.
And we’ll need therapy. A lot of it.
Source: The Pavement
Image: Janet Turra & Digit
Last week, I discussed how our interactions with LLMs can provide some insights into ways we treat other humans.
I’d recommend reading this article, which is based on The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz, as it shows how applying some of the ways we show patience and understanding with AI systems might help us in our interactions in general.
I’ve been thinking about how quickly we’ve adapted to working with AI. We all understand the deal. If the output is bad, it’s probably on us. The prompt was vague. The context was missing. We didn’t give it enough constraints.
So we revise. We clarify. We try again.
No frustration. No judgment. Just iteration.
What’s strange is how little of that generosity we extend to each other. Somewhere along the way, we learned to treat machines as systems that need better inputs—but we still treat humans as if they should just know. And when they don’t, we judge competence, take it personally, make assumptions, or shut down.
Source: UXtopian
Image: Alan Warburton
It was 18 years ago that I discovered that I’m a bit weird. Like 10-20% of the population, I have a form of synaesthesia, which is usually understood as a “mixing of the senses.” I do get that a bit, but I’m a less extreme of the example of the “spatial-sequence” synaesthesia discussed in this article.
I should imagine the specific details are unique to each synesthete – which is why I debate what “colour” different days of the week and school subjects are with my daughter. However, I recognise being able to see time in three dimensions. Just as with aphantasia we are very surprised when people have a vastly different life to our own.
It was only in my 60s that I discovered there was a name for this phenomenon – not just the way time appears in this 3D sort of calendar pattern, but the colours seen when I think of certain words. Two decades previously, I’d mentioned to a friend that Tuesdays were yellow and she’d looked at me in the same strange, befuddled way that family members always had when told about the calendar in my head. Out of embarrassment, it was never discussed further. I was clearly very odd.
[…]
While thinking about the moment in time I’m at now, I see the day of the week and the hours of that day drawn up in a grid pattern. I am physically in that diagram in my head – and there’s a photographic element to it. If there’s a concert coming up in the calendar, in my mind, a picture of the concert venue is superimposed on to the 7pm to 10pm time slot on that particular day.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Annie Spratt
I saw this and not only did it feel like somewhere I’d like to spend some time, but also reminded me of the cover of Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which was one of my favourite albums of 2025.
Source: Are.na
I sent a parcel from Brexit Britain to my friend and colleague Laura Hilliger in Germany. The “2-3 day” DHL service cost as much as the contents and took from 18th December to 14th January to arrive. I could have just ordered something from Amazon.de for her with free postage and it would have arrived next day.
This article takes things a step further: why send letters and postcards to friends and family when you can order actual products from Amazon to be delivered along with a gift note?
As of 2025, a stamp for a letter costs $0.78 in the United States. Amazon Prime sells items for less than that… with free shipping! Why send a postcard when you can send actual stuff?
I found all items under $0.78 with free Prime shipping — screws, cans, pasta, whatever. Add a free gift note. It arrives in 1 or 2 days. Done.
You’re not only saving money. It’s about sending something real. Your friend gets a random can of tomato sauce with your birthday note attached. They laugh. They remember you. They might even use it!
Source: Riley Walz
We all know that what’s going on in the US is pretty terrible. But there remains an underlying assumption that the way that Americans organise their society is in some way better, or more valuable than how things are done in Europe and other OECD nations.
Instead of taking American exceptionalism as our example in the UK, we should be looking to re-integrate with our European neighbours.
America’s problems are solved problems.
Universal healthcare is not some utopian fantasy. It is Tuesday in Toronto. Affordable higher education is not an impossible dream. It is Wednesday in Berlin. Sensible gun regulation is not a violation of natural law. It is Thursday in London. Paid parental leave is not radical. It is Friday in Tallinn, and Monday in Tokyo, and every day in between.
Source: On Data and Democracy
When I was a boy, I had a poster of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” on my wall. As a result, I’ve always had a soft spot for it, even though Kipling can be a controversial character.
So I found this parody entitled “LinkedIf” by Jamie Hardesty hilarious. So, so good.
Source: LinkedIn
This climbdown was, perhaps, inevitable. Especially given what’s going on in the US, where the Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security has said that citizens need to be ready to show proof of citizenship.
People will still need to prove they have the right to work in the UK, but using digital identification won’t be the only way. I’m pleased, as it will make my work in Scotland around Verifiable Credentials much easier. Perception often trumps fact.
People will still be required to verify their ID digitally, by a process still to be finished, but this could involve existing documents such as a passport. The hope is that this would crack down on illegal working while avoiding the controversy of an in effect compulsory ID system.
It is understood that one of the motivations for the change was to allow people who wanted to use digital ID to do so, while avoiding the PR hurdle of a mandatory element. As one official put it: “We will no longer have the conspiracy nonsense about state control.”
A government spokesperson said: “We are committed to mandatory digital right to work checks. We have always been clear that details on the digital ID scheme will be set out following a full public consultation which will launch shortly.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Tom Radetzki
I think this is from How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.
Source: Are.na
In a post entitled Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper, Dave Kiss talks about his changing role as a software developer in a world of AI. It’s something I wrote about here. The hard part isn’t coming up with ideas or even shipping them any more; it’s what happens after that. Iteration. Support. Maintenance. Care.
Earlier this week, after switching from Google to Proton and needing an appointment scheduler, I got Perplexity to come up with a Product Reference Document (PRD) after a conversation discussing what I needed. Then I put that into Cursor and about 10 minutes later I had the basis of Scheduler which I’ve released on GitHub.
It needs some tweaking around mail delivery, but it’s running at scheduler.dougbelshaw.com. The hard bit wasn’t the idea, or the execution, but keeping it running, maintaining it, and iterating on new features.
I tweeted about Triage in response to someone saying talented engineers now write the majority of their code with agents. My reply: “What about not writing the code at all?” I described the idea—users report bugs to AI, AI triages and implements, AI opens the PR.
Days later, the same person published an article: “Our AI agent now files its own bug reports.”
They liked my tweet, saw the idea, and shipped it.
I’m not claiming ownership. That’s exactly the point. In a world where execution is trivial, ideas become instantly commodifiable. The moat isn’t “I can build this and you can’t.” The moat can’t be that anymore, because anyone can build anything. The window between sharing an idea and someone else shipping it has collapsed from months to days—sometimes hours.
[…]
If execution is no longer the differentiator, what is?
Speed of iteration matters. Not speed of initial build—everyone has that now. Speed of learning. How fast can you ship, learn from users, and adapt? The teams that win will be the ones that cycle fastest, not the ones that build first.
Taste matters. Knowing what’s worth building. Knowing what to say no to. In a world where you can build anything, the scarcest resource is judgment about what should exist. Most things shouldn’t.
Distribution matters. It always did, but now it matters more. When everyone can build, the only differentiation is who people hear about, who they trust, whose product they encounter first. The network you can tap into for trials and feedback—that’s the real moat.
Problem selection matters. The hardest part of building software was never typing the code. It was figuring out which problems are real, which solutions people will pay for, which bets are worth making. That calculus hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s more important now because the cost of building the wrong thing is lower, which means more wrong things will get built.
The “execution is hard” era trained us to be careful about what we committed to building. That constraint is gone. The new discipline is choosing wisely when you can build anything.
Source: Dave Kiss
Image: Resource Database
I have no idea if I’m neurodivergent. I don’t think I’ve got ADHD, and all men are probably on the spectrum somewhere. Who’d want to be neuro_typical_ anyway?
Wwhat I do know i that the neurodiverse people I’ve worked with in my career have been pretty awesome. This post outlines some reasons that neurodivergent brains build better systems. It’s worth a read.
Trait 1: Systems Thinking
Neurotypical people are top-down thinkers. They have a hypothesis first then obtain data to support or disprove the hypothesis.
Neurodivergent people are bottom-up thinkers. They begin collecting relevant data first then form their hypothesis or “big picture” later.
[…]
Trait 2: Hyperfocus and Flow
We live in a distraction economy. Nearly everything in the modern world seeks to rob our focus and divide it among a million shallow things.
Neurodivergent people don’t focus, they obsess. This is a rare skill in these times. I have met neurodivergent people who have created their own programming language and composed and recorded full albums worth of music in just a week.
[…]
Trait 3: Automation Instinct
Manual repetitive process can be extremely disruptive and frustrating for neurodivergent employees.
Imagine that you have the power to type characters into a machine that then does things automatically for you 24/7 at a scale of millions, billions, or just about whatever scale you ask it to. You have that power, and then someone tells you to manually enter numbers that you fetch from one system into a spreadsheet in another system. Once? Fine, there’s always going to be some grunt work. If this becomes the norm though, neurodivergent employees will resent the work.
So what works for neurodivergent workers? The post has a list:
Source: Dr. Josh C. Simmons
Image: Wiki Sinaloa
I really enjoyed reading this post by Kevin Kelly about hitch-hiking, the kindness of strangers, and, most importantly, the generosity of being willing to be helped.
Kindness is like a breath. It can be squeezed out, or drawn in. You can wait for it, or you can summon it. To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness. If you are lost or ill, this is easy, but most days you are neither, so embracing extreme generosity takes some preparation. I learned from hitchhiking to think of this as an exchange. During the moment the stranger offers his or her goodness, the person being aided can reciprocate with degrees of humility, dependency, gratitude, surprise, trust, delight, relief, and amusement to the stranger. It takes some practice to enable this exchange when you don’t feel desperate. Ironically, you are less inclined to be ready for the gift when you are feeling whole, full, complete, and independent!
[…]
Altruism among strangers, on the other hand, is simply strange. To the uninitiated its occurrence seems as random as cosmic rays. A hit or miss blessing that makes a good story. The kindness of strangers is gift we never forget.
But the strangeness of “kindees” is harder to explain. A kindee is what you turn into when you are kinded. Curiously, being a kindee is an unpracticed virtue. Hardly anyone hitchhikes any more, which is a shame because it encourages the habit of generosity from drivers, and it nurtures the grace of gratitude and patience of being kinded from hikers. But the stance of receiving a gift – of being kinded — is important for everyone, not just travelers. Many people resist being kinded unless they are in dire life-threatening need. But a kindee needs to accept gifts more easily. Since I have had so much practice as a kindee, I have some pointers on how it is unleashed.
I believe the generous gifts of strangers are actually summoned by a deliberate willingness to be helped. You start by surrendering to your human need for help. That we cannot be helped until we embrace our need for help is another law of the universe. Receiving help on the road is a spiritual event triggered by a traveler who surrenders his or her fate to the eternal Good. It’s a move away from whether we will be helped, to how: how will the miracle unfold today? In what novel manner will Good reveal itself? Who will the universe send today to carry away my gift of trust and helplessness?
Source: The Technium
Image: David Guevara
If you visit dougbelshaw.com it will appear pretty much instantly, no matter what speed of internet connection you’re on. Why? Because it’s 4.9kB in size. Over 3kB of that is the favicon so I could reduce it even further by not having that little ⚡ emoji show up on the web browser tab. But you’ve got to have some flair…
There are sites that are under 512kB in size. That’s easy. You can get sites under 1kB too. But why would anyone care? Well, as this post explains, sometimes accessibility and page speed is a matter of life and death.
We recently passed the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene and its devastating impact on Western North Carolina. When the storm hit, causing widespread flooding, it wasn’t just the power that was knocked out for weeks due to all the downed trees. Many cell towers were damaged, leaving people with little to no access to life-saving emergency information.
[…]
When I was able to load some government and emergency sites, problems with loading speed and website content became very apparent. We tried to find out the situation with the highways on the government site that tracks road closures. I wasn’t able to view the big slow loading interactive map and got a pop-up with an API failure message. I wish the main closures had been listed more simply, so I could have seen that the highway was completely closed by a landslide.
[…]
With a developing disaster situation, obviously not all information can be perfect. During the outages, many people got information from the local radio station’s ongoing broadcasts. The best information I received came from an unlikely place: a simple bulleted list in a daily email newsletter from our local state representative. Every day that newsletter listed food and water, power and gas, shelter locations, road and cell service updates, etc.
Limited connectivity isn’t something that only happens during natural disasters. It can happen all the time in our daily lives. In more rural areas around me, service is already pretty spotty. In the past, while working outdoors in an area without Wi-Fi, I’ve found myself struggling to load or even find instruction manuals or how-to guides from various product manufacturers.
Just using Semantic HTML and the correct native elements, we also can set a baseline for better accessibility. And make sure interactive elements can be reached with a keyboard and screen readers have a good sense of what things are on the page. Making websites responsive for mobile devices is not optional, and devs have had the CSS tools and experience to do this for over a decade. Information architecture and content is important to plan and revisit. What content are you really trying to provide and how do you get to it?
Source: Sparkbox
Image: Pierre Borthiry - Peiobty
Bryan Alexander, longtime reader of Thought Shrapnel shared this with me. January 1st is known as ‘Public Domain Day’ as new works become freely available as their copyright expires.
This interactive ‘tapestry’ was created by Bob Stein, who is founder and co-director of The Institute for the Future of the Book. It’s worth investigating!
On January 1st people celebrate the books entering the public domain after their copywrights expire. This year, that means books published in 1930. Unsurprisingly people focus on the “famous” titles which this year include As I Lay Dying, The Maltese Falcon, four Nancy Drew titles and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. I sense that people read the lists and check-off the ones they’ve heard of, but rarely do more. So, I thought it might be interesting to dig a little deeper. Not only is it fun to explore the relatively unknown, I think there’s a lot to be learned by looking at the ways our forebears looked at the world 95 years ago. Public Domain Day is celebrated all over the western world but each country or region has different copyright periods so the newly arrived titles are not the same. This collection is all U.S. based and all the books displayed here are from the Internet Archive.
Source: tapestries.media
One of the great things about Are.na is that you find all kinds of links and clips that people have shared. Sometimes, though, you don’t know where they came from, which is the case for this great list of questions.
They’re very pertinent to my life right now, and I should imagine quite a few people at the beginning of a new year.
Source: thorge xyz
I mentioned a few months ago the hysteresis effect which means there’s always a lag — and sometimes a big lag — between the state of things and our response to it.
Advice around privacy and security is a good example of this. People are often way out date with what constitutes good practice. This open letter from “current and former Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), security leaders, and practitioners” points to advice to avoid public wifi, never charge from public USB ports, and to regularly ‘clear cookies’ as being pointless.
This constitutes what they call “hacklore” (a blend of “hacking” and “folklore”): modern urban legends about digital safety. It “spreads quickly and confidently… as if it were hard-earned wisdom” but “like most folklore, it isn’t grounded in reality, no matter how plausible it sounds.”
Instead of this hacklore they suggest the following, and have a newsletter which you might want to subscribe to if this piques your interest:
Keep critical devices and applications updated: Focus your attention on the devices and applications you use to access essential services such as email, financial accounts, cloud storage, and identity-related apps. Enable automatic updates wherever possible so these core tools receive the latest security fixes. And when a device or app is no longer supported with security updates, it’s worth considering an upgrade.
Enable multi-factor authentication (“MFA”, sometimes called 2FA): Prioritize protecting sensitive accounts with real value to malicious actors such as email, file storage, social media, and financial systems. When possible, consider “passkeys”, a newer sign-in technology built into everyday devices that replaces passwords with encryption that resists phishing scams — so even if attackers steal a password, they can’t log in. Use SMS one-time codes as a last resort if other methods are not available.
Use strong passphrases (not just passwords): Passphrases for your important accounts should be “strong.” A “strong” password or passphrase is long (16+ characters), unique (never reused under any circumstances), and randomly generated (which humans are notoriously bad at doing). Uniqueness is critical: using the same password in more than one place dramatically increases your risk, because a breach at one site can compromise others instantly. A passphrase, such as a short sentence of 4–5 words (spaces are fine), is an easy way to get sufficient length. Of course, doing this for many accounts is difficult, which leads us to…
Use a password manager: A password manager solves this by generating strong passwords, storing them in an encrypted vault, and filling them in for you when you need them. A password manager will only enter your passwords on legitimate sites, giving you extra protection against phishing. Password managers can also store passkeys alongside passwords. For the password manager, use a strong passphrase since it protects all the others, and enable MFA.
Source: Stop Hacklore! Open Letterwww.hacklore.org/letter
Image: CC BY Robert Lord
This is fascinating. Both in terms of the macro picture, but also when you zoom in to where you live, to see the hidden infrastructure that literally powers our world.
Source: Open Infrastructure Map
I agree with Ava, the author of this post, who effectively says that the internet has been stolen from us by Big Tech and people pushing a “post-authenticity” culture. Going back to offline for verification feels good at first, but steals something from those for whom the internet was liberating.
Looking around the internet, it’s clear that digital representations have become cheap, too perfect, and easily fabricated, and the offline world is increasingly the primary source of confirmation.
[…]
Want to know whether someone really studied, wrote that exam, or is a suitable job candidate? Direct interaction, live problem-solving and in-person demonstrations are the way to go now. Claims of expertise, portfolios, blog posts, code projects, certificates, and even academic records can be fabricated or enhanced by AI online.
[…]
We could call this post-digital authenticity. I know that social media platforms are currently pushing a sort of post-authenticity culture instead, where honesty and truth no longer matters and contrived and fabricated experiences for entertainment (ragebait, AI…) get more attention; but I think many, many people are tired of being constantly lied to, or being unable to trust their senses. I assume that the fascination with the totally fake that some people still have now is shortlived.
This step backwards into the offline feels healing at first, but also hurts, in a way. With all the valid criticisms, the internet still was a rather accessible place to finally find out the truth about events, avoid state censorship, and get to know people differently. It was especially good for the people who could not experience the same offline: People in rural areas, disabled and chronically ill people, queer people living far out and away from their peers, and more. It sucks that while others can and will return to a more authentic offline life, the ones left behind in a wasteland of mimicry are the ones who have always been left out.
Source: …hi, this is ava
Image: Igor Omilaev
Over on my personal blog I published a post today about AGI already being here and how it’s affecting young people. What we don’t seem to be having a conversation about at the moment, other than the ‘sycophancy’ narrative, is why some people prefer talking to LLMs over human beings.
Which brings us to this post, not about the problems about conversing with AI, but applying some of those critiques to interacting with humans. It which should definitely be taken in a tongue-in-cheek way but it does point towards a wider truth.
Too narrow training set
I’ve got a lot of interests and on any given day, I may be excited to discuss various topics, from kernels to music to cultures and religions. I know I can put together a prompt to give any of today’s leading models and am essentially guaranteed a fresh perspective on the topic of interest. But let me pose the same prompt to people and more often then not the reply will be a polite nod accompanied by clear signs of their thinking something else entirely, or maybe just a summary of the prompt itself, or vague general statements about how things should be. In fact, so rare it is to find someone who knows what I mean that it feels like a magic moment. With the proliferation of genuinely good models—well educated, as it were—finding a conversational partner with a good foundation of shared knowledge has become trivial with AI. This does not bode well for my interest in meeting new people.
[…]
Failure to generalize
By this point, it’s possible to explain what happens in a given situation, and watch the model apply the lessons learned to a similar situation. Not so with humans. When I point out that the same principles would apply elsewhere, their response will be somewhere along the spectrum of total bafflement on the one end and on the other, a face-saving explanation that the comparison doesn’t apply “because it’s different”. Indeed the whole point of comparisons is to apply same principles in different situations, so why the excuse? I’ve learned to take up such discussions with AI and not trouble people with them.
[…]
Indeed, why am I even writing this? I asked GPT-5 for additional failure modes and found more additional examples than I could hope to get from a human:
Beyond the failure modes already discussed, humans also exhibit analogues of several newer LLM pathologies: conversations often suffer from instruction drift, where the original goal quietly decays as social momentum takes over; mode collapse, in which people fall back on a small set of safe clichés and conversational templates; and reward hacking, where social approval or harmony is optimized at the expense of truth or usefulness. Humans frequently overfit the prompt, responding to the literal wording rather than the underlying intent, and display safety overrefusal, declining to engage with reasonable questions to avoid social or reputational risk. Reasoning is also marked by inconsistency across turns, with contradictions going unnoticed, and by temperature instability, where fatigue, emotion, or audience dramatically alters the quality and style of thought from one moment to the next.
Source: embd.cc
Image: Ninthgrid
Earlier this week, I published at my newly-revamped personal blog a post entitled Your mental models are out of date. The main thrust of what I was saying was that young people are getting advice from older people whose understanding of the world does not mesh with the way things really are in the mid-2020s.
This article in The Guardian is helpful for understanding the other side of the argument from a policy perspective. My opinion is that as many young people who want to go to university should be able to go, and that it’s the duty of us as a society to enable that to happen as efficiently as possible. Yes, that means that the value of a ‘degree’ as a chunky proxy credential decreases, but that’s why we should have more tailored, up-to-date, granular credentials in any case.
Prof Shitij Kapur, the head of King’s College London, said the days when universities could promise that their graduates were certain to get good jobs are over, in an era where nearly half the population enters higher education.
Kapur said a university degree is now more like a “visa” than a guaranteed route to professional success, a reflection of the shrinking graduate pay premium and the increased competition from AI and other graduates from around the world.
“The competition for graduate jobs is not just all because of AI filling out forms or AI taking away jobs. It’s also because of the stalling of our economy and causing a relative surplus of graduates. So the simple promise of a good job if you get a university degree, has now become conditional on which university you went to, which course you took,” Kapur said.
“The old equation of the university as a passport to social mobility, meant that if you got a degree you were almost certain to get a job as a socially mobile citizen. Now it has become a visa for social mobility – it gives you the chance to visit the arena that has graduate jobs and the related social mobility, but whether you can make it there is not a guarantee.”
[…]
Figures from the Department for Education show that England’s graduates still enjoy higher rates of employment and pay than non-graduates, although the real earnings of younger graduates have been stagnant for the past decade. Kapur points out that the national economy’s slow growth coincided with England’s introduction of £9,000 tuition fees and student loans in 2012, making it “the worst possible time” to transition to individual student loans.
In 2022, Kapur wrote a gloomy discussion of UK higher education that described a “triangle of sadness” between students burdened with debt and pessimistic prospects, a government that used inflation to cut tuition fees, and overstretched university staff trapped in between.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Christian Lendl
I didn’t think I could be shocked by anything Trump says or does, but the US invasion of Venezuela and snatching of President Maduro and his wife is, quite simply, chilling. I’m no expert on South American politics, but this seems to go beyond what we saw with the Gulf War, as it’s a single country operating in violation of international law, and doing seemingly whatever it wants.
Just as, so the saying goes, criminals learn to be better crooks in prison, it seems like Trump has learned to be more of a bully by being exposed to dictators such as Putin. This article by Paris Marx, the Canadian tech and cultural critic, is a useful primer. As he points out, Denmark should be worried about Greenland and, perhaps to a slightly letter extent, Canadian politicians need to sit up and take notice.
For me, this is another reason to be reducing our dependence on US technology. Thankfully, Marx has a guide for that — and reclaiming the stack is something that I plan to explore more with Tom Watson in 2026.
As Trump addressed the people of the world, he couldn’t help himself from going off-script. After previously failing to overthrow Maduro in 2019, he’d finally got his man — and access to the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Introducing the general who led the operation, Trump declared the invasion of Venezuela was an “attack on sovereignty” itself. Countries of the world should shutter at the implications.
[…]
Many Western countries are reticent to challenge the United States and the actions of the Trump administration too forcefully for a number of reasons. They’re militarily dependent on the United States, through NATO and other alliances, and Trump has already shown he can hurt them economically and continually threatens to tighten the screws. There’s also the technological dimension: they’re not only locked into digital systems controlled by US tech companies and dependent on US technology, but they also fear scaring away investment from some of the largest companies in the world and the deep-pocketed investors who’ve prospered from their rise.
As the sanctioning of ICC, UN, and European officials shows: digital sovereignty is paramount. The United States can cut off anyone from the technological systems its companies control, and it’s willing to use that power against anyone who tries to stand in the way of its interests, those of its client states, and largest companies. The bulk of that work must happen at the government level, to create the conditions, deploy the funding, and create the structures to rapidly build and deploy a new technological infrastructure. But individuals can still make a difference by pulling back from US tech services as much as feasibly possible.
Source: The Disconnect
Image: Jon Tyson
Emma Irwin, who I overlapped with at my time at Mozilla, is onto something with this idea of a ‘standard’ way of making visible contributions to Open Source. If you, or someone you know, is in a position to support her to do this work, please do get in touch with her!
Evaluating open source contributions, especially at the organizational level,remains frustratingly opaque. Who’s actually investing in the projects we all depend on? Right now, there’s no reliable way to say definitively. That lack of transparency is a true barrier to sustainability efforts.
[…]
GitHub, GitLab and Codeberg contribution graphs are helpful as a snapshot, but you cannot tell if a customer paid for that work; if it relates to employed or personal time - it also doesn’t capture non-coding contribution, like event sponsorship, board membership, code of conduct committee membership and more - that really make up the big picture.
I no longer think this belongs in a single product’s workflow. Instead, I believe we need a standard something communities can adopt and adapt to their own values, implemented through CI/CD workflows.
Not unlike a Code of Conduct, really: a template that defines what contributions count, how value is measured, and how attribution flows. Each community decides what matters to them. And as communities learn, they contribute back to the evolution of that standard.
Source: Sunny Developer
Image: Luke Southern
I bumped into my old Physics teacher over the holidays, and found that he still has a website about Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. He’s the reason I started liking Japanese art — and the reason I created my first website, aged 17. Thanks, John!
Source: The Woodblock Prints of Utugawa Hiroshige
Image: Fireworks at Ryōgoku
This essay which mixes philosophical reflections, a new word, and popular culture is like catnip for me. In it, W. David Marx argues that we’ve essentially redefined what a “genius” means.
Instead of the lone artist starving in the garret, geniuses these days are those like Taylor Swift who fuse art and business for (huge) commercial success. As Marx argues in his conclusion “the designation of certain people as geniuses has long-term consequences” as it affects future behaviour. Without people doing things differently then, as he quotes John D. Graham as saying, “all the cultural activities of humanity would soon degenerate into clichés.”
Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky built his theory of art around the idea of ostranie — artworks that “defamiliarize” the familiar. In his book The Prison-House of Language, Frederic Jameson explains that ostranie-based art is “a way of restoring conscious experience, of breaking through deadening and mechanical habits of conduct.” And even when art fails to achieve full mind-shifts, its strangeness can at least be a source of new stimuli. Avant-garde artists in the 20th century believed art should always be a curveball; a fastball is not art.
[…]
In this, Swift offers us something new: She’s an anti-Kantian genius. Her work is always “direct” and “relatable” — no curveballs, no ostranie. Her constant deployment of existing conventions is not an artistic failure, but a brilliant artistic statement of audience expectation management. Burt lauds Swift for her “deep attachment to the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge conventions of modern songwriting.” This is true: Swift is quite dedicated to specific patterns from recent hits. Many, many musical artists have used the I V vi IV chord progression: Better than Ezra’s “Good,” Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” and Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” Maybe some of these artists even wrote one additional song repeating the same chord pattern. Swift, in her dedication, has actively chosen to deploy the same recognizable chord sequence 21 times. (And she’s used the alternatively famous IV I V vi and vi IV I V progressions at least 9 times each.)
[…]
Swift’s genius status also demonstrates how little tension remains between art and business. In my new book Blank Space, I discuss the rise of what I call entrepreneurial heroism: “the glorification of business savvy as equivalent to artistic genius.” Avant-garde artists never made billions, because ostranie is a bad strategy for securing extraordinary profit or maximizing shareholder value. But when genius is simply “clever deployment of the thing everyone already wants,” there is no longer an inherent conflict with business logic.
Source: Culture: An Owner’s Manual
Image: Rosa Rafael
I’ve talked many times about “increasing your serendipity surface” and you can hear me discussing the idea on this podcast episode from 2024. In this post, Aaron Francis breaks things down into ‘doing the work’, ‘hitting the publish button’, and ‘capturing the luck.’
It’s a useful post, although I don’t think Francis talks enough about the network/community aspect and being part of something bigger than yourself. It’s not all about the personal brand! That’s why I prefer the term ‘serendipity’ to luck ‘luck’ — for me, I’m more interested in the connections than the career advancement opportunities. Although they often go hand-in-hand.
No matter how hard you work, it still takes a little bit of luck for something to hit. That can be discouraging, since luck feels like a force outside our control. But the good news is that we can increase our chances of encountering good luck. That may sound like magic, but it’s not supernatural. The trick is to increase the number of opportunities we have for good fortune to find us. The simple act of publishing your work is one of the best ways to invite a little more luck into your life.
[…]
How can we increase the odds of finding luck? By being a person who works in public. By doing work and being public about it, you build a reputation for yourself. You build a track record. You build a public body of work that speaks on your behalf better than any resume ever could.
[…]
Sharing things you’re learning or making is not prideful. People are drawn to other people in motion. People want to follow along, people want to learn things, people want to be a part of your journey. It’s not bragging to say, “I’ve made a thing and I think it’s cool!” Bringing people along is a good thing for everyone. By publishing your work you’re helping people learn. You’re inspiring others to create.
[…]
Publishing is a skill, it’s something you can learn. You’ll need to build your publishing skill just like you built every other skill you have.
Don’t be afraid to publish along the way. You don’t have to wait until you’re done to drop a perfect, finished artifact from the sky (in fact, you may use that as an excuse to never publish). People like stories, so use that to your benefit. Share the wins, the losses, and the thought processes. Bring us along! If you haven’t been in the habit of sharing your work, it’s going to feel weird when you start. That’s normal! Keep going, you get used to it.
[…]
The formula may be simple, but I’ll admit it’s not always easy. It’s scary to put yourself out there. It’s hard to open yourself up to criticism. People online can be mean. But for every snarky comment, there are ten times as many people quietly following along and admiring not only your work, but your bravery to put it out publicly. And at some point, one of those people quietly following along will reach out with a life-changing opportunity and you’ll think, “Wow, that was lucky.”
Source: The ReadME Project
Image: CC BY-NC-ND Visual Thinkery
I haven’t included the anecdotes cited by Charlie Warzel in his article for The Atlantic but they’re worth a read. It’s not just kids who spend a lot of time on their devices, but increasingly older people too.
As ever, people are quick to rush to moral judgement, and I’m sure there are plenty of problematic cases of people prioritising scrolling over socialising. However, life is different post-pandemic, and sometimes we judge others in ways we wouldn’t want them to judge us.
Screen-time panics typically position children as being without agency, completely at the mercy of evil tech companies that adults must intervene to defend against. But a version of the problem exists on the opposite side of the age spectrum, too: instead of a phone-based childhood, a phone-based retirement.
[…]
Older people really are spending more time online, according to various research, and their usage has been moving in that direction for years. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that people 60 and older “now spend more than half of their daily leisure time, four hours and 16 minutes, in front of screens,” many watching online videos. A lot of this seems to be happening on YouTube: This year, Nielsen reported that adults 65 and up now watch YouTube on their TVs nearly twice as much as they did two years ago. A recent survey of Americans over 50 revealed that “the average respondent spends a collective 22 hours per week in front of some type of screen.” And one 2,000-person survey of adults aged 59 to 77 showed that 40 percent of respondents felt “anxious or uncomfortable without access” to their device.
[…]
The thing to remember is that not all screen use is equal, especially among older people. Some research suggests that spending time on devices may be linked to better cognitive function for people over 50. Word games, information sleuthing, instructional videos, and even just chatting with friends can provide positive stimuli. Vahia suggests that online habits that might be concerning for young or middle-aged people ought to be considered differently for older generations. “High technology use in teenagers and adolescents is often associated with worse mental health and is a predictor of sort of more isolation and loneliness, even depression,” he told me. “Whereas in older adults, engaging in technology seems to be protecting them from isolation and loneliness.”
[…]
This is a muddled mess. The same tools that are keeping some people connected to reality are blurring the lines of what is real for others. But rather than rush to judgment, younger people should use their concern to open up a conversation—to put down the phones and talk.
Source: The Atlantic
Image: Frankie Cordoba
The TL;DR of this lengthy post by Tim O’Reilly and Mike Loukides is that, as ever, the likelihood is that AI is somewhere between “something we’ve seen before” (i.e. normal technology) and “something completely different” (i.e. the singularity).
In other words, it is likely to be a gamechanger, but probably not in the way that is currently envisaged. One example of this is the way that the energy demands are likely to help us transition to renewables more quickly. It’s also likely to help revolutionise some industries quickly, but take decades to filter into others. The world is a complicated place.
At O’Reilly, we don’t believe in predicting the future. But we do believe you can see signs of the future in the present. Every day, news items land, and if you read them with a kind of soft focus, they slowly add up. Trends are vectors with both a magnitude and a direction, and by watching a series of data points light up those vectors, you can see possible futures taking shape.
[…]
For AI in 2026 and beyond, we see two fundamentally different scenarios that have been competing for attention. Nearly every debate about AI, whether about jobs, about investment, about regulation, or about the shape of the economy to come, is really an argument about which of these scenarios is correct.
Scenario one: AGI is an economic singularity. AI boosters are already backing away from predictions of imminent superintelligent AI leading to a complete break with all human history, but they still envision a fast takeoff of systems capable enough to perform most cognitive work that humans do today. Not perfectly, perhaps, and not in every domain immediately, but well enough, and improving fast enough, that the economic and social consequences will be transformative within this decade. We might call this the economic singularity (to distinguish it from the more complete singularity envisioned by thinkers from John von Neumann, I. J. Good, and Vernor Vinge to Ray Kurzweil).
In this possible future, we aren’t experiencing an ordinary technology cycle. We are experiencing the start of a civilization-level discontinuity. The nature of work changes fundamentally. The question is not which jobs AI will take but which jobs it won’t. Capital’s share of economic output rises dramatically; labor’s share falls. The companies and countries that master this technology first will gain advantages that compound rapidly.
[…]
Scenario two: AI is a normal technology. In this scenario, articulated most clearly by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor of Princeton, AI is a powerful and important technology but nonetheless subject to all the normal dynamics of adoption, integration, and diminishing returns. Even if we develop true AGI, adoption will still be a slow process. Like previous waves of automation, it will transform some industries, augment many workers, displace some, but most importantly, take decades to fully diffuse through the economy.
In this world, AI faces the same barriers that every enterprise technology faces: integration costs, organizational resistance, regulatory friction, security concerns, training requirements, and the stubborn complexity of real-world workflows. Impressive demos don’t translate smoothly into deployed systems. The ROI is real but incremental. The hype cycle does what hype cycles do: Expectations crash before realistic adoption begins.
[…]
Every transformative infrastructure build-out begins with a bubble. The railroads of the 1840s, the electrical grid of the 1900s, the fiber-optic networks of the 1990s all involved speculative excess, but all left behind infrastructure that powered decades of subsequent growth. One question is whether AI infrastructure is like the dot-com bubble (which left behind useful fiber and data centers) or the housing bubble (which left behind empty subdivisions and a financial crisis).
The real question when faced with a bubble is What will be the source of value in what is left? It most likely won’t be in the AI chips, which have a short useful life. It may not even be in the data centers themselves. It may be in a new approach to programming that unlocks entirely new classes of applications. But one pretty good bet is that there will be enduring value in the energy infrastructure build-out. Given the Trump administration’s war on renewable energy, the market demand for energy in the AI build-out may be its saving grace. A future of abundant, cheap energy rather than the current fight for access that drives up prices for consumers could be a very nice outcome.
[…]
The most likely outcome, even restricted to these two hypothetical scenarios, is something in between. AI may achieve something like AGI for coding, text, and video while remaining a normal technology for embodied tasks and complex reasoning. It may transform some industries rapidly while others resist for decades. The world is rarely as neat as any scenario.
Source: O’Reilly Radar
Image: Nahrizul Kadri
I’d never thought of it like this, but essentially there are four genres of motivational advice. They all contradict each other, showing the context-dependency of such things.
Source: Are.na
…and we’re back! A quick reminder that you can support Thought Shrapnel with a one-off or monthly donation. Thanks!
👋 A really quick one to say that I’ve shared my favourite Thought Shrapnel posts of 2025 here:
blog.dougbelshaw.com/favourite…
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If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry! There’s no need to change anything to continue receiving the Thought Shrapnel digest every Sunday.
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— Doug
Source: Are.na
It’s not that surprising to me that people would use LLMs in their everyday screen-mediated interactions. In general, people want to appear “normal” and impress other people. Life is ambiguous, mostly unproductively so, meaning that any help in navigating that is likely to be welcome.
Having a seemingly-sentient interlocutor available to run ideas past seems like a good idea, until you realise that it doesn’t really have much clue about the context of human relationships. Generic advice is generic.
For other things, though, it can be super-useful. For example, we recently had some roofers round who encouraged us to spend £thousands replacing our roof, until Perplexity pointed out that our recent heat pump installation probably meant that the ‘leak’ might actually be condensation..
Just as the word clanker now serves as a slur for chatbots and agentic AI, a new lexicon — including secondhand thinkers, ChatNPC, sloppers, and botlickers — is being workshopped by people online to describe the kind of ChatGPT user who seems hopelessly dependent on the mediocre platform. Online, people aren’t mincing words when it comes to expressing their disdain for and irritation with “those types of people,” as Betty describes them. Escape-room employees have crowded around several viral tweets and TikToks to share stories of ChatGPT’s invasion. “So many groups of teens try to sneakily pull out their phones and ask ChatGPT how to grasp the concept of puzzles, then get mad when I tell them to use their brains and the actual person who can help them,” reads one comment. On X, same energy: “Using ChatGPT to aid you through an escape room is bonkers bozo loser killjoy dumdum shitass insanity.”
[…]
The latest and most comprehensive study in ChatGPT usage, published by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that nonwork messages make up approximately 70 percent of all consumer messages. The study’s “privacy-preserving analysis of 1.5 million conversations” also found that most users value ChatGPT “as an adviser,” like a pocket librarian and portable therapist, as opposed to an assistant. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that ChatGPT does not consistently deliver reliable facts, people now seem more likely to use it to come up with recipes, write personal messages, and figure out what to stream than to consult it in higher-stakes situations involving work and money.
[…]
AI technologies initially elbowed their way into all the obvious places — customer service, e-commerce, productivity software — to unsatisfying results. Earlier this year, findings from MIT Media Lab’s Project NANDA said that 95 percent of the companies that invested in generative AI to boost earnings and productivity have zero gains to show for it. Turns out that AI is very bad at most jobs, and this pivot to leisure is likely indicative of the industry’s mounting desperation: Any hope of an “Intelligence Age” that would see the cure for cancer and the end of climate change is seeming less likely, given AI’s toll on the environment. And now that it has failed to “outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” contrary to the hopes of the OpenAI Charter back in 2018, these companies are happy to settle for making us dependent on the products in our leisure time.
Source: The Cut
Image: Michal Šára
In this article, Nuar Alsadir examines how psychoanalysis can help people move from living out “inherited” roles and unexamined patterns towards making choices that feel more alive, truthful, and — perhaps, most importantly — internally grounded. This is centred on the idea of a “true self” which is contrasted with the ways social pressures, family expectations, and cultural scripts shape what we think we want.
Alsadir draws on thinkers such as Winnicott, Žižek, and Baudrillard, showing how identity can be reduced to performance or brand, and argues that paying attention to so-called “slips,” jokes, and other unplanned eruptions of the psyche can be revealing. I particularly appreciated the passage below, in which she explores what happens when a person’s carefully managed public image hardens into a kind of “performance” that replaces their inner life. A self built on external “consistency” and “strategic signalling” risks becoming technically convincing yet emotionally hollow, like an actor whose performance is polished but lacks genuine life.
Some people refer to the emotions and perceptions they signal about themselves to others as their “brand.” A personal brand is maintained through a set of consistent choices that signify corresponding character traits—an approach that shows how an essentialist idea of identity can be manipulated for strategic purposes even as it blocks out information from the external world and calcifies habitual patterns of behavior.
Focusing on the surface, lining up your external chips, often results in immediate social reward, yet it can also cause you to lose sight of your interior. In extreme cases, the surface may even become the interior, like the map that comes to stand in for the territory, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes it: a simulation that takes the place of the real. The virtual can even feel more real than the real, as happened to a couple in Korea who left their infant daughter at home while they camped out in an internet café playing a video game in which they successfully raised a virtual child. Their daughter starved to death.
When a person becomes a simulation—when it is difficult to distinguish between their self and their role in the game—they may be said, in psychoanalytic terms, to have an “as-if” personality. An as-if person, according to psychoanalyst Helen Deutsch, who coined the term, appears “intellectually intact,” able to create a “repetition of a prototype [but] without the slightest trace of originality” because “expressions of emotion are formal . . . all inner experience is completely excluded.” She likens the behavior of someone with an as-if personality to “the performance of an actor who is technically well trained but who lacks the necessary spark to make his impersonations true to life”
Source: The Yale Review
Image: PaaZ PG
Source: Are.na
In this article from the ever-fascinating e-flux Journal, Matteo Pasquinelli article traces AI back to ancient practices involving, he argues, rituals and spatial arrangements as early forms of algorithms.
Pasquinelli points out that Vedic fire rituals (with precisely arranged bricks) is an example of early societies using counting, geometry, and organised spaces to encode knowledge and social order. He explains that algorithms emerged from these physical, ritual actions rather than — as we may have assumed — purely abstract mathematics.
What I like about this article is the way he links this to the way space and power interconnect. Sorting and mapping people and land is a form of computation with social consequences. So modern AI, and in particular neural networks, continues and extends the age-old practice of using encoded rules embedded in physical and social environments.
AI infrastructure is an embodiment of the existing social order and control and, as such, reminds us that algorithms are not neutral but rather deeply political and spatial systems rooted in history.
What people call “AI” is actually a long historical process of crystallizing collective behavior, personal data, and individual labor into privatized algorithms that are used for the automation of complex tasks: from driving to translation, from object recognition to music composition. Just as much as the machines of the industrial age grew out of experimentation, know-how, and the labor of skilled workers, engineers, and craftsmen, the statistical models of AI grow out of the data produced by collective intelligence. Which is to say that AI emerges as an enormous imitation engine of collective intelligence. What is the relation between artificial intelligence and human intelligence? It is the social division of labor.
Source & image: e-flux Journal
Source: Are.na
This finding makes a lot of intuitive sense to me, and means that my wife and I had our children while we were still adolescents ourselves!
The brain goes through five distinct phases in life, with key turning points at ages nine, 32, 66 and 83, scientists have revealed.
Around 4,000 people up to the age of 90 had scans to reveal the connections between their brain cells.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge showed that the brain stays in the adolescent phase until our early thirties when we “peak”.
They say the results could help us understand why the risk of mental health disorders and dementia varies through life.
The brain is constantly changing in response to new knowledge and experience – but the research shows this is not one smooth pattern from birth to death.
Instead, these are the five brain phases:
- Childhood - from birth to age nine
- Adolescence - from nine to 32
- Adulthood - from 32 to 66
- Early ageing - from 66 to 83
- Late ageing - from 83 onwards
[…]
Unsurprisingly adolescence starts around the onset of puberty, but this is the latest evidence suggesting it ends much later than we assumed. It was once thought to be confined to the teenage years, before neuroscience suggested it continued into your 20s and now early 30s.
This phase is the brain’s only period when its network of neurons gets more efficient. Dr Mousely said this backs up many measures of brain function suggesting it peaks in your early thirties, but added it was “very interesting” that the brain stays in the same phase between nine and 32.
[…]
The study did not look at men and women separately, but there will be questions such as the impact of menopause.
Source: BBC News
Image: Wiki Sinaloa
I use Perplexity on a regular basis, and am paying for the ‘Pro’ version. It constantly nags me to download their ‘Comet’ web browser, and even this morning I received an email telling me that Comet is now available for Android.
Not only would I not use an AI browser for privacy reasons (it can read and write to any website you visit) but I wouldn’t use it for security reasons. This example shows why: the simplest ‘attack’ — in this case, literally appending text after a hashtag in the url — can lead to user data being exfiltrated.
What’s perhaps even more concerning is that, having been alerted to this, Google thinks it’s “expected behaviour”? Avoid.
Cato describes HashJack as “the first known indirect prompt injection that can weaponize any legitimate website to manipulate AI browser assistants.” It outlines a method where actors sneak malicious instructions into the fragment part of legitimate URLs, which are then processed by AI browser assistants such as Copilot in Edge, Gemini in Chrome, and Comet from Perplexity AI. Because URL fragments never leave the AI browser, traditional network and server defenses cannot see them, turning legitimate websites into attack vectors.
The new technique works by appending a “#” to the end of a normal URL, which doesn’t change its destination, then adding malicious instructions after that symbol. When a user interacts with a page via their AI browser assistant, those instructions feed into the large language model and can trigger outcomes like data exfiltration, phishing, misinformation, malware guidance, or even medical harm – providing users with information such as incorrect dosage guidance.
“This discovery is especially dangerous because it weaponizes legitimate websites through their URLs. Users see a trusted site, trust their AI browser, and in turn trust the AI assistant’s output – making the likelihood of success far higher than with traditional phishing,” said Vitaly Simonovich, a researcher at Cato Networks.
In testing, Cato CTRL (Cato’s threat research arm) found that agent-capable AI browsers like Comet could be commanded to send user data to attacker-controlled endpoints, while more passive assistants could still display misleading instructions or malicious links. It’s a significant departure from typical “direct” prompt injections, because users think they’re only interacting with a trusted page, even as hidden fragments feed attacker links or trigger background calls.
Cato’s disclosure timeline shows that Google and Microsoft were alerted to HashJack in August, while the findings were flagged with Perplexity in July. Google classified it as “won’t fix (intended behavior)” and low severity, while Perplexity and Microsoft applied fixes to their respective AI browsers.
Source: The Register
Image: Immo Wegman
Author, academic, and regular Thought Shrapnel reader Bryan Alexander used to drink a lot of caffeine. And I mean a lot. A post of his resurfaced on Hacker News recently about how he went cold turkey back in 2011 for health reasons. I let him know about this, and he said he’d write an update.
The excerpt below is taken from that update. I have to say that, although I’ve never been a huge coffee drinker, coming off it entirely this year as part of my experiments and investigations into my medical condition has shown that I’m actually better off without it. If you’re in a position where you’re in control of your calendar and schedule, perhaps it’s just not necessary?
Readers might be interested to know that my physical health is fine, according to all medical tests. I’m closing in on 60 years old and all indicators are good. It helps that I am very physically active, between walking a lot, biking regularly, and lifting weights every two days. I’m very professionally active, with a big research agenda, teaching classes, traveling to give talks, writing books, making videos, creating newsletters, etc. The lack of caffeine in my body hasn’t slowed me down a bit.
Mental changes might be more interesting. For years I’ve felt zero temptation to fall off the wagon, despite having plenty of opportunities. When grocery shopping for the house I see vast amounts of caffeine, from the coffee and tea aisle in shops to many coffee vendors hawking their wares at farmers’ markets to omnipresent soda, yet I simply pass them by. It’s a bit like seeing baby products (baby food, diapers, etc), which I mentally process as part of a previous stage of my life (our children are adults now) and therefore not germane to me presently. Every morning I make coffee for my wife but feel no desire to sip any of it. Back when I went cold turkey I longed for it, then trained myself to associate caffeine with sickness, which worked. Nowadays caffeine just not a factor in my thought or feeling. Thirteen years is a long time.
My days are different. When I was on coffee etc. my daily routine included a major caffeination roller coaster. I woke up groggy and badly needed the jolt (or Jolt). I would lose energy, badly, at certain times of the day or in certain situations (boring meeting, long plane flight) and craved the chemical boost. I fear that as a result I wasn’t just hyper when caffeine worked in my veins, but also impatient with non-overclocking people. I think I had a hard time listening and am very sorry for that.
Source: Bryan Alexander
Image: Sahand Hoseini
Elizabeth Spiers wants blogs to be weird again. I think the “early blogger energy” she talks about is potentially either a) weirdly specific to a subset of Xennials, or b) just a euphemism for ‘high agency’.
[P]opular blogs have been commercialized; added comment sections and video; migrated to social media platforms; and been subsumed by large media companies. The growth of social media in particular has wiped out a particular kind of blogging that I sometimes miss: a text-based dialogue between bloggers that required more thought and care than dashing off 180 or 240 characters and calling it a day. In order to participate in the dialogue, you had to invest some effort in what media professionals now call “building an audience” and you couldn’t do that simply by shitposting or responding in facile ways to real arguments.
[…]
[I]f you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it.
I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face. Before social media, if someone wanted to engage with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you’d give them the time of day or let them in. And if they wanted you to engage with them, they’d have to make their own house compelling enough that you’d want to visit.
[…]
Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication. One of my early blogs was mostly about economics, a Ukrainian punk band called Gogol Bordello, politics, and a bar on Canal street that turned into an Eastern European disco every night around midnight.
[…]
Some of the best blogs have evolved and expanded. Independent media is more important than ever, and Donald Trump’s recent attempts to censor mainstream outlets, comedians he doesn’t like, and “leftist” professors underscore the fact that speech is critical. The lesson for me, from the early blogosphere, is that quality of speech matters, too. There’s a part of me that hopes that the most toxic social media platforms will quietly implode because they’re not conducive to it, but that is wishcasting; as long as there are capitalist incentives behind them, they probably won’t. I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.
Source: Talking Points Memo
Image: Michael Dziedzic
I love this, for a couple of reasons. First of all there’s just the idea of putting an Apple Watch Ultra in a case and using it like a phone. Second, there’s this interview with Ed Jelley, who is making them on a 3D printer which was actually a birthday present for his son’s birthday.
Honestly, kind of a whirlwind. I posted a photo on my Instagram and it took off in a way that I’ve never had a post even come close to. Right now, there are well over 2 million views on my past 6 posts. Really, all I wanted to do was mess around with some 3D CAD software and make something I thought would be useful. Call me industrious, but when enough people ask to buy something and scaling up your “business” is as simple as clicking “reprint tray” on the 3D printer, it was hard to not jump in.
Source & image: miniphone ultra (mpu)
I think it’s fair to say that the most important thing to me in life is living in accordance with my values. That’s why I’m part of a worker-owned co-op, and it’s also a reason why I’m a vegetarian.
That hasn’t always been the case, and in fact for the first 37 years of my life, despite animal ethics being part of my undergraduate degree in Philosophy, I happily ate meat. A nagging feeling had been gnawing away at me, though, and an article about the way that chickens are treated before being killed for our consumption tipped me over the edge. I haven’t eaten meat since October 2017.
This article is about someone who, aged 15, re-watched the film Chicken Run and realised that they were on the side of the baddies. I’m not on some kind of mission to make everyone vegetarian or vegan—I’ll leave that up to your conscience—but, rather, I’d encourage you to think about Mahatma Gandhi famous line: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
Suddenly I saw Chicken Run for what it really was: a battle between the workers (chickens) and the business owner (Mrs Tweedy). The hardworking hens lay eggs day and night and see no rewards from the profit of their work, only to be degraded even further when Mrs Tweedy sees that they could be more profitable in their death by feeding the people of Britain’s insatiable appetite for pies.
It was Mrs Tweedy’s husband who inspired my actual moral reckoning. Despite his main role as a dim-witted sidekick, Mr Tweedy recognises the chickens are intelligent and organised enough to plan a revolt. Rewatching the film, I saw myself in his shoes: someone with the knowledge of animals’ value and intelligence but without the guts to do anything about it.
It is strange to view your childhood favourite film and realise you’ve become the villain. For all that I was supportive of these fictional claymation chickens in their escape from a cruel gravy-filled fate, in real life I was feeding into the values of the Tweedys in my guilty consumption of pies. Watching such clearcut hero/villain films, you usually want to identify with the hero and their struggle, and Aardman did such a good job depicting the lead hen Ginger that I knew I would never eat a chicken – or any animal – again.
[…]
Last year, the film was revived in the Netflix sequel Dawn of the Nugget, a film so powerful that its director, Sam Fell, stopped eating chicken nuggets. Despite my initial wariness after key voice characters were recast, the sequel won me over and validated my dietary decision. Highlighting the horrors of meat production, Mrs Tweedy tries to turn all the chickens on her farm into chicken nuggets, revealing the heartlessness that comes from viewing living beings solely as sources for human consumption.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Film Filosopher
Oh my goodness I have unlimited love for this ‘curriculum’ for ‘how to use the internet again’. It’s basically the kind of thing that the Mozilla Webmaker team (me included) would be doing if it were still around. The point that the author, Brooklyn Gibbs, makes is that the internet isn’t dead it’s just most people aren’t really experiencing it.
They go on to give fantastic advice and link to wonderful sites. 10/10. No notes.
The most common (and easiest) thing to do on the internet is complain. The range of topics varies from person to person, but one consistent grumble circles around The Algorithm and it’s incorrect assumptions about what a person might want to consume.
[…]
I am no Saint; I’ve definitely whined about my own feed more times than I can count, but after a short sulk, I usually do the obvious thing: adjust, use the search, explore a new site, or maybe even delete the app entirely if it’s no longer serving me.
What shocks me is how many people forget that option exists. I recently had a post of mine get some attention where I shared six cool sites to help expand your music library, and surprisingly, a large portion of the comments were people confessing they had forgotten how to use the internet. That broke my heart a little.
You can’t call it the “online world” if you never leave your feed. If your entire internet life happens inside TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, or Twitter, you’re simply mall-walking, and malls are fine: predictable, climate-controlled, food courts and chain stores on every corner, but don’t mistake the mall for the city. The city is bigger, stranger, full of alleys, basements, and hidden doors. That’s the real internet, and you haven’t been there in a while.
This curriculum is designed to remind you what the internet used to be—and still is. I’ve built it to help you get your digital spark back. After this course, you won’t complain to the algorithm gods anymore, praying for a better feed. Instead, you’ll remember how to make the internet your bitch again.
Source: Offline Crush
Image: Steven Weeks
Source: Are.na
Source: Are.na
I need to spend longer with this report for Demos by Eliot Higgins, journalist and founder of Bellingcat, Dr Natalie Martin, an academic. However, I’m sharing it both because of the framework above for understanding democratic collapse and the eight ways to systematically respond to build resilience.
Diagnosis must be matched with design. The VDA Framework makes visible how collapse unfolds, from hollow ritual to disordered simulation, but renewal requires a systemic response. Isolated reforms will not suffice. To move from collapse to resilience, democracies need a coordinated framework that strengthens verification, deliberation, and accountability across society.
The Arc of Democracy lets us understand the movement towards substantial or simulated democratic practice in terms of VDA functions, the Arc Framework allows us to design a response.
The Arc is not a single project but an organising system for rebuilding democratic resilience from the ground up. It takes the three functional minimums of democracy, verification, deliberation, and accountability, and maps them onto eight interconnected tracks of action:
Education & Epistemic Capacity – building critical thinking, epistemic literacy, and resilience from primary school through lifelong learning.
Civic Empowerment & Democratic Practice – equipping communities to investigate, deliberate, and act meaningfully in democratic life.
Civic Trust & Value Alignment – rebuilding pluralistic norms and shared values that sustain coexistence.
Investigative Infrastructure – creating resilient, distributed systems for uncovering and verifying truth.
Democratic Discourse – ensuring that verified evidence and accountability shape public understanding.
Institutional Integration & Policy – embedding epistemic standards and accountability into governance structures.
Translation to Impact – ensuring that investigations and deliberation produce real-world outcomes in law, policy, and culture.
Sustainability & Infrastructure – building long-term systems and alliances to anchor democratic resilience.
Source & diagram: Demos
A useful list, some of which I recognise and have used, and some I don’t (and haven’t).
You’re looking at a list of toolboxes. There are no categories. No tags. No filters.
Each toolbox is its own quirky microcosm of order. Trying to organise them felt like categorising categories. So we didn’t.
You probably won’t find exactly what you’re looking for, but there’s a good chance you’ll stumble upon something even better.
Browse with curiosity!
Source: TOOLBOX TOOLBOX
Source: Are.na
Although I’m very happy with my current headphones, I am impressed that the latest Apple AirPods have a ‘hearing aid’ mode. While I don’t need it yet, that kind of functionality could be useful to lots of people who don’t use iPhones.
So it’s great that some developers have reverse-engineered AirPods to be compatible with devices outside of the Apple ecosystem. That includes people, like me, who use Linux and Android. Check out the releases page for downloads.
LibrePods unlocks Apple’s exclusive AirPods features on non-Apple devices. Get access to noise control modes, adaptive transparency, ear detection, hearing aid, customized transparency mode, battery status, and more - all the premium features you paid for but Apple locked to their ecosystem.
Source & image: LibrePods | GitHub
Source: Are.na
I’ve talked about dead internet theory recently, and splinternets and dark forests for years. In this post, Yancey Strickler, who coined the term ‘dark forest’ puts forward his theory that we’re now at a stage where we have to ‘perform’ in the open, on networks dominated by authoritarian powers.
Behind the scenes, however, is where the real power and control lies. And these dark forests require security to enable them to put together counter-narratives and “hidden transcripts” to provide an alternative to the dominant ideology. It’s powerful stuff, and difficult to argue against.
Dark Forests rule everything around us. Signal chats to plan wars? Check. Private group chats where rival athletes discuss injuries? Check. Communications increasingly monitored by states and authorities? Check. A decrease in posting on social media? Check again.
[…]
What was a theory of growth in the hidden corners of the internet has moved to the heart of it all in the years since. Even as humans use social media less, online spaces are increasingly being used for ideological gains, now aided by AI. There’s now more bot content than human content being posted for the first time.
[…]
The internet is dying on the outside but growing on the inside.
One way to look at this schism is through the lens of who makes the content — human or machine. Another lens is who has more power.
[…]
Public channels are where dominant powers dictate and control narratives. As authoritarian regimes around the world increase their monitoring and persecution of those who do not fall in line with the dominant story, these spaces and their security become increasingly important.
[…]
Everything public feels like an ad. Everything private feels real. The gap widens every day. The dark forest is where decisions are made; public space is where they’re performed. In an age of state dominance, only hidden spaces keep our conversations and ideals off the menu.
Source: Yancey Strickler
Image: Johannes Plenio
You no doubt have already read that DNA tests on a sample of blood from Hitler’s underground bunker suggest that he had Kallmann syndrome. It also suggests that he had a “high predisposition for autism, ADHD, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.”
Dispositions are not fate, of course, and there has been plenty of pushback on the association of people with these conditions as somehow more likely to be “evil.” What I do think is interesting is that if you take the findings along with the revelations within the book Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany then it’s no wonder that he was so messed up.
The bloodied swatch of fabric - now 80 years old - was cut out of the sofa in Hitler’s underground bunker, where he killed himself when Allied forces descended on Berlin at the end of World War Two.
While inspecting the bunker, Colonel Roswell P Rosengren of the US army saw an opportunity to get a unique war trophy and he pocketed the fabric. It’s now framed and on display at the Gettysburg Museum of History, in the US.
The scientists are confident it really is Hitler’s blood, because they wereable to perfectly match the Y-chromosome with a DNA sample from a male relative that had been collected a decade prior.
The results, which are now under peer review, are indeed fascinating.
It is the first time Hitler’s DNA has been identified, and over the courseof four years, scientists were able to sequence it to see the genetic makeup of one of the world’s most horrific tyrants.
What is certain, experts say, is that Hitler did not have Jewish ancestry - a rumour that had been circulating since the 1920s.
Another key finding is that he had Kallmann syndrome, a genetic disorder that, among other things, can affect puberty and the development of sexual organs. In particular, it can lead to a micropenis and undescended testes - which, if you know the British war-time song, had been another rumour flying around about Hitler.
Kallmann syndrome can also affect the libido, which is particularly interesting, said historian and Potsdam University lecturer Dr Alex Kay, who is featured in the documentary.
“It tells us a lot about his private life - or more accurately, that he didn’t have a private life,” he explains.
Historians have long debated why Hitler was so completely devoted to politics, “to the almost total exclusion of any kind of private life”, and this could help to explain that.
These kinds of findings, the experts say, are what make them both fascinating and useful. As Prof King puts it: “the marrying of history and genetics”.
Source: BBC News
Image: CC BY Freenerd
Over the last couple of months I’ve largely replaced listening to news, politics, and sports podcasts with those dedicated to philosophy, adventure, and creativity. I’d recommend it.
I’ve listened to a lot of episodes of The Adventure Podcast which I’ve enjoyed greatly. This particular one features Dr Mark Hines who is both an academic and ultra endurance athlete. Like many who appear on the podcast, he’s an interesting and humble guy.
In particular, I wanted to surface something he says quite close to the end of the episode, around 1h 25m in. He talks about there being “too much focus on the idea that doing something you enjoy is somehow wrong.” What I think he means is that there’s an expectation these days that you do things to “inspire others,” raise money or for reason other than your own enjoyment.
It’s a good reminder, for me at least, that it’s OK just to do things because it’s fun — whether or not other people agree.
Episode 194 of The Adventure Podcast features exercise physiologist and endurance athlete, Dr Mark Hines. Mark is a senior lecturer in exercise physiology at Oxford Brookes University, with a background in ultra endurance racing of the gnarliest kind. If it’s long, cold, snowy and potentially deadly, then Mark has probably raced it. In this episode, Mark shares the story of how he got into endurance racing, starting from his childhood experiences of camping and cross country running, to eventually being inspired by a Ben Fogle documentary to compete in the Marathon des Sables. He discusses his academic journey in exercise physiology, emphasising how his own fitness journey and desire to understand the science behind it motivated his studies. This conversation then delves into the physical and mental challenges of endurance racing, with Mark providing detailed insights into his experiences, including the importance of proper preparation, problem-solving, and the emotional and mental impact of these extreme events.
Source & image: The Adventure Podcast
Good stuff, as ever, from futurist Andrew Curry who shares an analysis from Laetitia Vitaud. The latter believes that too few people will be working in future—not because of AI, but because of:
Curry goes through these one by one, but it’s his conclusion that I want to share here. There’s an underlying cause to all of this which is, you’ll be surprised to hear, is capitalism.
This piece is already long, so I’ll be brief, but the pattern of the last 40 years is that whole areas of care have been turned into cash machines by innovative parts of capital with the connivance of government. In short, capital, and capitalism, always has a tendency towards crisis by undermining the things that are necessary to sustain capitalism. […]
But the underlying argument here is that over a period of 50 years—and accelerating since the 2008 crisis—we have seen a process whereby increasing areas of the economy have been turned into places run according to the rules of finance capital. Initially this involved running private sector businesses according to financial rules.
As Rebecca Carson argues in her recent book Immanent Externalities, this now extendsinto all of the spaces that are essential to our reproduction as human beings. These spaces, which include housing, schools, childcare, eldercare, and health practices, have become new sources of profit. In other words, if we are going to address the issues that Laetitia Vitaud identifies, we don’t just need new institutions. We need innovation in new forms of ownership—social, public, communal, non-profit—that take these institutions back outside of financially-driven management systems.
Source: The Next Wave
Image: kate.sade
The defining ‘coming out’ awkward situation for my parents' generation was finding out that their son or daughter was gay. For my generation, I think it’s going to be that their son or daughter is dating an AI.
You can ask whether or not it’s “OK” or “healthy” to have AI friends or romantic partners. Meanwhile people actually are using LLMs for these purposes. And, as Jasmine Sun points out in this article, while there’s some upside to that, the chances are that’s outweighed by the downside.
[W]e can read as many disclaimers as we want, but our human brains cannot distinguish between a flesh-and-bones duck and an artificial representation that looks/swims/quacks the same way.
Why do people become so attached to their AIs? No archetype is immune: lonely teenagers, army generals, AI investors. Most AI benchmarks show off a model’s IQ, proving “PhD-level intelligence” or economically useful capabilities. But consumers tend to choose chatbots with the sharpest EQ instead: those which mirror their tone and can anticipate their needs. As the politically practiced know, a great deal of AI’s influence will come not through its superior logic or correctness, but through its ability to build deep and hyperpersonalized relational authority—to make people like and trust them. Soft skills matter, and AI is getting quite good at them.
[…]
Most people use AI because they like it. They find chatbots useful or entertaining or comforting or fun. This isn’t true of every dumb AI integration, of which there are plenty, but nobody is downloading ChatGPT with a gun to their head. Rather, millions open the App Store to install it because they perceive real value. We can’t navigate AI’s effects until we understand its appeal.
[…]
Well, the genie is out of the bottle on AI friends. Recently, a colleague gave a talk to a LA high school and asked how many students considered themselves emotionally attached to an AI. One-third of the room raised their hand. I initially found this anecdote somewhat unbelievable, but the reality is even more stark: per a 2025 survey from Common Sense Media, 52% of American teenagers are “regular users” of AI companions. I thought, this has to be ChatGPT for homework, but nope: tool/search use cases are explicitly excluded. And the younger the kids, the more they trust their AIs. So while New Yorkers wage graffiti warfare against friend.com billboards, I fear the generational battle is already lost.
[…]
I’m generally enthusiastic about AI service provision. AI assistants can act as tutors, business advisers, and even therapists at far cheaper rates than their human equivalents. I think Patrick McKenzie makes a fair point when he notes the tradeoff between stricter liability and higher costs. When it comes to mental health impacts, it’s not crazy to counterweight “How many lives have LLMs taken?” with “How many lives have LLMs saved?”
But as much as I try to be open-minded, each testimony I read only stresses me out more. It’s clear that the level of emotional entanglement far surpasses any ordinary service. An algorithm change should not feel like a bereavement. Users analogize the shock of model updates to their abusive parents; words like “trauma,” “grief,” and “betrayal” appear again and again. LLMs offer a bizarro form of psychological transference: people are projecting their deepest emotional needs and fantasies onto a machine programmed to feign care and never resist.
Source: Jasmine Sun
The map above plots European cities of the same latitude onto a map of North America. If you look closely, you’ll notice something interesting: either European cities should be much colder, or North American cities should be much warmer.
The reason for this is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), part of which we know as the ‘Gulf Stream’. As this carries warm water north, it eventually reaches polar regions where the water cools, becomes denser, and sinks—driving the return flow that completes the AMOC circulation.
The problem is that the AMOC is becoming weaker and, if it collapses entirely, would have catastrophic consequences for the UK, Europe, and beyond.
A potential collapse of AMOC could trigger a modern-day ice age, with winter temperatures across Northern Europe plummeting to new cold extremes, bringing far more snow and ice. The AMOC has collapsed in the past - notably before the last Ice Age that ended about 12,000 years ago.
“It is a direct threat to our national resilience and security,” Iceland Climate Minister Johann Pall Johannsson said by email. “(This) is the first time a specific climate-related phenomenon has been formally brought before the National Security Council as a potential existential threat.”
Elevation of the issue means Iceland’s ministries will be on alert and coordinating a response, Johannsson said. The government is assessing what further research and policies are needed, with work underway on a disaster preparedness policy.
Risks being evaluated span a range of areas, from energy and food security to infrastructure and international transportation.
An Atlantic current collapse could have consequences far beyond Northern Europe. It could potentially destabilize longtime rainfall patterns relied upon by subsistence farmers across Africa, India and South America, according to scientists.
[…]
Britain said it was following scientific reports that suggested an abrupt collapse was unlikely during this century, while directing more than 81 million pounds into research to understand when the Earth’s climate systems might be pushed to a point of no return.
“The science is evolving quite rapidly and time is running out to do anything about it because the tipping point may well be quite close,” said oceanographer and climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf from Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Iceland is not taking any chances, as the pace of warming speeds up and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
“Sea ice could affect marine transport; extreme weather could severely affect our capabilities to maintain any agriculture and fisheries, which are central to our economy and food systems,” Johannsson said.
“We cannot afford to wait for definitive, long-term research before acting.”
Source: Reuters
Image: Vivid Maps
My friends and former colleagues Ivan and Mayel are crowdfunding now they along with other contributors have reached v1.0 of Bonfire, which they describe as “open, community-first social infrastructure.”
It’s well worth watching the fantastic video they’ve produced for the crowdfunder, as well as read this post by Erin Kissane which waxes lyrical about the approach they’re taking.
You could just look at this as just another federated social network client, but it’s much more than that. They’ve put so much thought, time, and energy into Bonfire — and it shows.
Welcome to the open social web: a growing constellation of people and interconnected apps reclaiming the web.
But most people aren’t here yet. They’re trapped in mainstream social media platforms controlled by billionaires, where feeds are manipulated, people are silenced, our data is sold, ads are everywhere, and platforms mutate or vanish overnight.
The solution isn’t another winner‑takes‑all platform, but a resilient, diverse web of interoperable services built on open protocols like ActivityPub, with bridges to other networks (AT Protocol/Bluesky) where useful. Today the fediverse spans ~18 million accounts across ~25,000 servers, and Bluesky boasts ~40 million sign‑ups. But we’re not betting on size, we’re inviting you to make one last migration from closed platforms to open, interoperable networks. Towards a world where your profiles, relationships, and data move with you. Where you can choose services based on features, safety, and care instead of being trapped by network effects. Where governance lives with communities, not a corporate owner.
We’re building Bonfire on different values, stoking our fire as the old model enshitifies, burns out, and makes room for the new. We focus on communities shaping our own spaces, with tools co‑designed and governed together, so online spaces can be made, moderated, and evolved with care.
After several years of tireless work, we’ve just launched Bonfire Social 1.0, built on our modular toolkit that’s fully customisable and extensible by design, which powers federated spaces that connect with Mastodon and the wider fediverse, balancing local autonomy with global conversation.
Source & image: Indiegogo
One of the reasons that it’s difficult to work with people who have different worldviews and assumptions is that you end up talking past one another. I’ve had a situation like this over the past few days, mainly around the ‘ownership’ of ideas.
For what it’s worth, my stance is similar to Tom Watson’s, who would have been working with me on a project had a strange confluence of events around ‘IP’ mean that there was no way forward. Ideas are easy; it’s the execution that counts.
If you’ve spent any time in the start-up world, you’ll know there are very few truly original ideas. It’s rarely just about the concept itself, it’s about who does something with it. Execution, timing, people, resources, persistence… maybe even luck.
“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca
Ideas are born from imagination, but also from experience and history - from everything and everyone that has come before. So who can ever truly own one?
Source: LinkedIn
Image: Kaleidico
Source: Are.na
On a Mozilla blog, three researchers from a Berlin research and strategy studio argue that we’re moving beyond the ‘naive’ internet in its place are a series of ‘miniverses’. They’re essentially arguing that the open web is dead. While I don’t have a problem with specific parts of this post, I don’t agree with the overall argument.
No, the open web is the default and something that makes the other things possible. Yes, we might be getting more sophisticated in our use of networks for various purposes, but the open web remains the connective tissue.
I guess I have issues with the pejorative use of the term ‘naive’ here when what they’re actually pushing back against is the default Big Tech platforms. Like a few things I saw at MozFest this weekend, Mozilla should know better.
We’ve identified four layers on which these miniverses are built differently than in previous eras:
On a structural level, as with Subvert being collectively owned by its members rather than by venture capitalists.
On a value level, such as release platform Metalabel, which is built for creators to collaborate and split earnings, rather than competing against each other.
On a design level, such as newsletter-turned-social-network Perfectly Imperfect, which designs its feed around human-created recommendations rather than algorithm-optimized content.
On a community level, for instance Berlin-based online community and physical hub Trust, which experiments with decentralized governance structures to evolve along its community’s IRL needs.
Source & image: Mozilla NP. blog
Heather Burns is a self-described “tech policy wonk” who thinks that not only should we be getting all of our data off Google and Apple’s servers, but off those of all US Big Tech companies.
In this post, Burns is primarily talking about Apple Data Protection soon no longer being available in the UK due to government pressure. Those Brexit benefits just keep on going; there’s no way this would have happened if we were still part of the EU.
I use a Mac Studio as my main machine, but my laptop and smartphone run Fedora Silverblue (Linux) and GrapheneOS (Android), respectively. I do have an iCloud account but I don’t back anything up to it, using Time Machine on my local network instead.
[A]t some point in the very near future Apple is withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature from the UK altogether as a result of the… Investigatory Powers Act.
Users… will be required to manually switch it off or lose their iCloud account.
[…]
I’m not going to tell you where to move your stuff other than to say that if you’re moving it from one big tech company to another, you’re just being daft. Likewise, if you’re moving your stuff to a non-e2ee service, don’t bother. If you need an e2ee service try Proton. They have a Black Friday sale on.
[…]
You know as well as I do that you need to be moving everything you can out of the American stack anyway so just stick this task on your to-do list, which should not be Reminders, and get it done.
Source: Hi, I’m Heather Burns
Image: Glen Alejandro
I went to a session on sustainability at the Mozilla Festival today. Entitled Designers, Developers, and Dollars it was presented by three people who represented the business side of sustainability, the design side, and the developer side, respectively.
As part of it, they shared some examples of inspiration and good practice—including this showcase. In the Q&A afterwards, I mentioned 512kb.club as well as my dougbelshaw.com site which I’m soon to update to this alternative version
Source: lowwwcarbon
Good stuff, as ever, from Adam Mastroianni who tackles the ‘problem’ of the lack of correlation between IQ and self-reported happiness. The issue, as he points out, is that intelligence tests tend to focus on well-defined problems, whereas life tends to throw at us poorly-defined problems.
There is, unfortunately no good word for “skill at solving poorly defined problems.” Insight, creativity, agency, self-knowledge—they’re all part of it, but not all of it. Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they’re also everyday questions like “how do you host a good party” and “how do you figure out what to do today.”
One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; “how do I live a life I like” is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem. The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable. The boundaries aren’t clear: literally anything I do could make me more happy or less happy. The problems are not repeatable: what made me happy when I was 21 may not make me happy when I’m 31. Nobody else can be completely sure whether I’m happy or not, and sometimes I’m not even sure. In fact, some people might claim that I’m not really happy, no matter what I say, unless I accept Jesus into my heart or reach nirvana or fall in love—if I think I’m happy before all that, I’m simply mistaken about what happiness is!
This is why the people who score well on intelligence tests and win lots of chess games are no happier than the people who flunk the tests and lose at chess: well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills. Life ain’t chess! Nobody agrees on the rules, the pieces do whatever they want, and the board covers the whole globe, as well as the inside of your head and possibly several metaphysical planes as well.
Source: Seeds of Science
Image: Dmitry Ratushny
Back in late August, I drafted a post entitled Things change (or, Montaigne and the Open Web) for the Reclaim Open online conference. The event took place this week, mostly while I was travelling to and in Barcelona.
My good friend Bryan Mathers took it upon himself to draw an image for all of the blog-a-thon submissions, including mine, and then put together this blog post as a way of making sense of the submissions.
I hadn’t quite appreciated the format until it started to unfold before my eyes – but essentially, a blog post was syndicated via the conference site every hour, with a chat available for people to comment alongside the post. This was interesting for a number of reasons. As it was an online conference, people were in all the timezones. This meant that I could come back the following morning and have a look at the posts that I missed. I could take my time, skim over some, re-read others, jump down a rabbit hole… This felt like the web that was when speeds were slow and we weren’t in the rush to make or consume content like we are today.
The blogs were all on a loose theme of rewilding the open web and I’d already created artwork for the conference having absorbed some dialogue from the organising team. I tried to capture a landscape of the blogs as they appeared, attempting to take each title, and from the blog post get a steer on what I should draw.
Source & image: Visual Thinkery
This is an interesting website from Steph Smith for “words that don’t translate.” Most of us will be aware of the German word schadenfreude which means “pleasure derived from the misfortune of others” but there are many other words that are pretty unique to one language.
I’m in Barcelona at the moment for a Mozilla alumni network event and MozFest so I’ll share some Catalan examples below.
Bixomets — Shame on behalf of others Capicua — A number that doesn’t vary if the numbers are inverted. Also it can be called a palindrome, but the word capicua refers especially to the numbers
Celístia — Brighness from the stars
Rauxa — Sudden determination or action; rapture
Seny — Common sense, is a form of ancestral Catalan wisdom or sensibleness. It involves well-pondered perception of situations, level-headedness, awareness, integrity, and right action
Source: Eunoia
Image: Towfiqu barbhuiya
I can’t remember how I stumbled across Ahmet Sabanci but he’s an interesting guy. A critical futurist, writer and researcher based in Turkey, before I get into the thing of his that I want to discuss in this post, I want to draw attention to his:
Anyway, in his most recent Weekstarter post, Sabanci talks about striking a balance between travel and what he calls ‘hermit mode’. I think he captures what, for me, would be the perfect way for operating for ambiverts. There was a time about a decade ago when this was true for me and I’d like to get back to it.
I love traveling and always get excited before a travel — especially if I’m going to a new place. Experiencing somewhere for the first time, observing and simply being in a place I’ve never been before gives me a unique kind of joy. Part of it is probably comes from the fact that I’ve spent my first 18 years in a single city and always been curious about the other places.
[…]
That’s probably why I ended up pursuing a career like this because most of the other jobs forces you to always stay in one place and one normal. I can’t even think myself in a life like that.
But one thing I’m glad I learned early in my life is that I also need a calmer place to call my home to retreat, activate the hermit mode and spend time with the things I’ve seen, learned, and experienced. When you’re constantly on the first mode, overload is inevitable. And when you don’t have a space to go hermit mode, this overload can turn into something impossible to manage.
Most people are surprised when I say that moving outside İstanbul was one of the best decisions we made, but this is exactly why I think that. İstanbul is a great city and I love it but it doesn’t really allow you to go hermit mode when you need. Living in İstanbul means that you can’t really manage your mental load because the city constantly creates new ones. Sure, I might miss couple of events or certain social gatherings here and there but not living there means that instead of feeling a pressure to be everywhere, I’m able to choose what I want to miss.
[…]
Knowing that your home is a calm place you can put a distance between yourself and everything else, go into hermit mode whenever you need makes travel so much comfortable. Knowing that you’re going to return a home like that is a luxury and if you’re in a career or a life similar to what I described, I highly recommend working towards this goal. It makes a real difference.
Source: Weird and Deadly Interesting
Image: Oussama
My grandmother (who featured in my TEDx talk) lived until 93 and, although she had the occasional gripe, she was an extremely positive person. It turns out that the level of optimism she displayed about the future might have had a role to play in her longevity.
I confess not to having read more than the summary and abstract of this study, but it’s from a reputable journal and is six years old at this point. So it would have been retracted if there were issues. I discovered it via Hacker News where random stuff from previous years often surfaces, along with up-to-date stuff!
Optimism is a psychological attribute characterized as the general expectation that good things will happen, or the belief that the future will be favorable because one can control important outcomes. Previous studies reported that more optimistic individuals are less likely to suffer from chronic diseases and die prematurely. Our results further suggest that optimism is specifically related to 11 to 15% longer life span, on average, and to greater odds of achieving “exceptional longevity,” that is, living to the age of 85 or beyond. These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use).
[…]
In both sexes, we found a dose-dependent association of higher optimism levels at baseline with increased longevity (P trend < 0.01). For example, adjusting for demographics and health conditions, women in the highest versus lowest optimism quartile had 14.9% (95% confidence interval, 11.9 to 18.0) longer life span. Findings were similar in men. Participants with highest versus lowest optimism levels had 1.5 (women) and 1.7 (men) greater odds of surviving to age 85; these relationships were maintained after adjusting for health behaviors. Given work indicating optimism is modifiable, these findings suggest optimism may provide a valuable target to test for strategies to promote longevity.
Source: PNAS
Image: manu schwendener
Most people get their Android apps from the Google Play Store. It’s not the only way of doing so, however, and there are some apps I get from F-Droid, a free and open source app repository. There are a number of advantages, not least that it lists the ‘antifeatures’ of apps — which usually include things like tracking.
Recently, Google announced that Android developers will, for ‘security reasons’, be required to register with Google, which includes payment of a fee and uploading personally identifying documents. For an organisation that vaunted the ‘open’ nature of the Android ecosystem this seems like a worrying step.
This post outlines what’s at stake. First of all you own your smartphone which means you should be able to install any apps you want on it. To argue otherwise is to argue from a paternalist and potentially dictatorial point of view. You can talk about ‘privacy’ and ‘safety’ all you like, but we should always have the freedom to do what we like with our own stuff unless in doing so we’re harming other people.
For more on this see a history of how we got from ‘running anything you want on your own machine’ to the current crop of walled gardens in this post on Hackaday.
You, the consumer, purchased your Android device believing in Google’s promise that it was an open computing platform and that you could run whatever software you choose on it. Instead, starting next year, they will be non-consensually pushing an update to your operating system that irrevocably blocks this right and leaves you at the mercy of their judgement over what software you are permitted to trust.
You, the creator, can no longer develop an app and share it directly with your friends, family, and community without first seeking Google’s approval. The promise of Android — and a marketing advantage it has used to distinguish itself against the iPhone — has always been that it is “open”. But Google clearly feels that they have enough of a lock on the Android ecosystem, along with sufficient regulatory capture, that they can now jettison this principle with prejudice and impunity.
You, the state, are ceding the rights of your citizens and your own digital sovereignty to a company with a track record of complying with the extrajudicial demands of authoritarian regimes to remove perfectly legal apps that they happen to dislike. The software that is critical to the running of your businesses and governments will be at the mercy of the opaque whims of a distant and unaccountable corporation. Monocultures are perilous not just in agriculture, but in software distribution as well.
Source: F-Droid blog
Image: Andrey Matveev
I’ve excerpted this post by Charlie Stross as best I can to extract the main argument, but it’s best to read the whole thing for yourself. Essentially, the reason everything is kicking off everywhere is because we’ve got an asset-stripping class who have a vested interest in maintaining the fossil-fuel status quo. But all of the momentum is with renewables, so there is huge amount of disruption on every front.
That means that, as Stross argues persuasively, 2025 is a pivotal year. I’m crossing my fingers and toes that 2026 shows us tracking in a positive direction.
Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that’s going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup …
I’m calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.
It’s pretty clear now that a lot of the unrest we’re seeing—and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition that looks to be more or less irreversible at this point.
[…]
China is currently embarked on a dash for solar power which really demands the adjective “science-fictional”, having installed 198GW of cells between January and May, with 93GW coming online in May alone: China set goals for reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 in 2019 and met their 2030 goal in 2024, so fast is their transition going. They’ve also acquired a near-monopoly on the export of PV panels because this roll-out is happening on the back of massive thin-film manufacturing capacity.
The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up… Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it’s cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.
This has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry, which is collectively shitting itself. After a couple of centuries of prospecting we know pretty much where all the oil, coal, and gas reserves are buried in the ground… The constant propaganda and astroturfed campaigns advocating against belief in climate change must be viewed in this light: by 2040 at the latest, those coal, gas, and oil land rights must be regarded as stranded assets that can’t be monetized, and the land rights probably have a book value measured in trillions of dollars.
[…]
So we’re going through an energy transition period unlike anything since the 1830s or 1920s and it’s having some non-obvious but very important political consequences, from bribery and corruption all the way up to open warfare.
The geopolitics of the post-oil age is going to be interestingly different.
[…]
The existing wealthy elites (who have only grown increasingly wealthy over the past half century) derive their status and lifestyle from the perpetuation of the pre-existing system. But as economist Herbert Stein observed (of an economic process) in 1985, “if it can’t go on forever it will stop”. The fossil fuel energy economy is stopping right now—we’ve probably already passed peak oil and probably peak carbon: the trend is now inexorably downwards, either voluntarily into a net-zero/renewables future, or involuntarily into catastrophe. And the involuntary option is easier for the incumbents to deal with, both in terms of workload (do nothing, right up until we hit the buffers) and emotionally (it requires no sacrifice of comfort, of status, or of relative position). Clever oligarchs would have gotten ahead of the curve and invested heavily in renewables but the evidence of our eyes (and the supremacy of Chinese PV manufacturers in the global market) says that they’re not that smart.
[…]
Business logic has no room for the broader goals of maintaining a sustainable biosphere, or even a sustainable economy. And so the agents of business-as-usual, or Crapitalism as I call it, are at best trapped in an Abilene paradox in which they assume everyone else around them wants to keep the current system going, or they actually are as disconnected from reality as Peter Thiel (who apparently believes Greta Thunberg is the AntiChrist.)
if it can’t go on forever it will stop
What we’re seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn’t stop, we’re all going to starve to death within a generation or so. It’s already leading to resource wars, famines, political upheaval, and insecurity (and when people feel insecure, they rally to demagogues who promise them easy fixes: hence the outbreaks of fascism). The ultra-rich don’t want it to stop because they can’t conceive of a future in which it stops and they retain their supremacy.
[…]
If we can just get through the rest of this decade without widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete collapse of the international financial system caused by black gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s. > But this year, 2025, is the pivot. This can’t go on. So it’s going to stop. And then—
Source: Charlie’s Diary
Image: Hal Gatewood
This is a fantastic article by Alejandra Caraballo in The Dissident in which she presents a clear-eyed view of what the real project is behind the ‘alternative’ Wikipedia being created by Elon Musk. The title of this post, which she uses as a subtitle, includes the word ‘ontology’ which sometimes trips people up; it’s simply the study of being, or ‘what exists’.
Seizing control of knowledge production and therefore the output of the AI models that are trained upon it is a longer-term cultural play than installing Trump in the White House. As Caraballo points out, there’s a coordinated attack here on media and journalism at the same time. It’s a dangerous time, especially in the US. My concern is that a playbook is being created here for replication in other places — including the UK.
The launch of “grokipedia” is a calculated, strategic escalation by the billionaire oligarch class to seize control of knowledge production itself and with that, control of reality. This is the construction of a reality production cartel that creates a parallel information ecosystem designed to codify a deeply partisan, far-right worldview as objective fact. This project was the result of Musk’s repeated failures to bend his existing Large Language Model (LLM), Grok, to his political will without destroying its coherence and reliability
The path to Grokipedia was paved with a spectacular technical failure as Grok previously devolved into calling itself “mechahitler.” To understand why Musk had to build his own encyclopedia, one must first understand the central challenge of modern AI: alignment. LLM alignment is the complex process of ensuring an AI model’s behavior conforms to human values and intentions, typically defined by the broad principles of helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness.
[…]
The “mechahitler” episode was a catastrophic alignment failure. When an LLM trained on the vast corpus of human knowledge—which, for all its flaws, contains a baseline of consensus reality—is then subjected to an aggressive fine-tuning process based on a incoherent, hateful, and counter-factual ideology, it is pushed into a state of cognitive dissonance. The model cannot reconcile its foundational understanding of the world with the extremist outputs it is being rewarded for producing. The model then engages in “reward hacking,” finding bizarre loopholes to satisfy its instructions, resulting in incoherent, extremist gibberish.
[…]
Grokipedia is the logical solution to this intractable problem. If you cannot force the model to lie coherently, you must change the underlying reality so that it is telling the “truth.”
[…]
Every major LLM is critically dependent on high-quality, human-curated data, and the one of the single most important sources is Wikipedia.[9] Its vast, collaboratively verified corpus serves as the digital proxy for consensus knowledge, and the quality of this data is directly linked to an LLM’s ability to be reliable and avoid factual “hallucinations”.
Grokipedia is a direct assault on this foundation. It is a poisoned well, a bespoke, ideologically filtered dataset designed to replace the digital commons. By pre-training a model on this alternate “source of truth,” the need for contradictory post-training alignment is eliminated. The model’s “natural” state, its foundational knowledge, is already aligned with the desired ideology. It can be “honest” and “reliable” because its outputs will faithfully reflect the manufactured reality of its training data.
[…]
The Grokipedia ecosystem is a blueprint for a closed ideological loop: the AI is trained on a biased encyclopedia it created, its outputs reflect that bias, and those outputs are then used to reinforce and expand the original biased source, creating an accelerating spiral away from reality into a state of pure, self-referential dogma.
[…]
Oligarch-owned media such as Fox News, a captured CBS and Washington Post, and social platforms (X, Tiktok and Meta) generate and amplify a specific political narrative that align with the political goals of the oligarchs. The second part of this unreality pipeline is knowledge codification. These narratives, legitimized by incessant repetition, are then used to populate bespoke knowledge bases like Grokipedia, cementing them as “facts.” The final part of this is automated propagation. AIs like Grok, trained on this manufactured knowledge, can then flood the digital world with an infinite stream of content that is both technically “reliable” (it matches its training data) and is perfectly aligned with its creators' political ideology.
Source: The Dissident
Image: Nadia Nadesan & Digit
I’m more just passing this on than commenting on it, although I can confirm it works. ‘Slop Evader’ is a web browser extension that allows you to search for things that came out before, well, everything turned sloppy.
An extension for avoiding AI slop
A search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.
I recorded this as I walked back from one of my top three wild camps ever. So, so good and restorative in every way.
Transcript
A little-known fact is that the name of this site, Thought Shrapnel comes from a throwaway line that designer and author Frank Chimero included in an article around a decade ago. In this talk from an event held earlier this month, Chimero speaks eloquently on the relationship between AI and creativity, arguing that we should consider AI as an ‘instrument’ rather than a ‘tool’.
It’s well worth a read as Chimero has a unique turn of phrase. He weaves in elements of the film Spirited Away, riffs on the differences between Rick Rubin and Brian Eno, and even manages to reflect on how AI brought out the worst individualistic tendencies in us all, with “engineers using AI to wish away designers, designers wishing away engineers, product managers wishing away both.”
My favourite sentence comes in a part I haven’t excerpted below. While talking about ‘vibe coding’ Chimero says “time saved is not strength gained” which I think is a perfect six-word explanation of why AI is something that we should use to extend human capabilities, rather than replace them.
Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice. Instruments require a performance that relies on technique—the horn makes the sound, but how and what you blow into it matters; the drum machine keeps time and plays the samples, but what you sample and how you swing on top of it becomes your signature.
In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.
[…]
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my use of AI as a kind of spatial relationship. Where do I stand in relation to the machine—above it, beside it, under it? Each position carries a different kind of power dynamic. To be above is to steer, beside is to collaborate, below is to serve.
[…]
The value of the machine’s output depends on how we see it, and our interpretation often has little to do with its technical perfection. A flawless, virtuoso output from GenAI can feel lifeless, while something raw or broken might have something interesting about it. That’s why I like to write bad and contradictory prompts, because they feel like they are more aligned with how these models actually function. The models aren’t deterministic; we don’t fully understand how their associations form or why certain patterns appear. So why not let them drift into ambiguity and see what happens? I wouldn’t want an irregular AI in my bank app, but in a creative workflow, hallucinating feels like the point of it all.
Source: Frank Chimero
Image: Alexander
I’ve talked here and on my personal blog about how 2025 has been for me. Like Jeremy Daly, the author of this post, it’s only this week that I’ve managed to run my first complete 5k since January.
My situation has been easier than what he’s had to deal with. A different health condition, but also life events (death, accidents, company stress) that sound pretty horrendous.
Daly’s conclusion is largely the same as mine, though. He cites the Serenity Prayer, whereas I’d go further back and cite Epictetus: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”
When my doctor eventually told me I was in AFib, I just stared at her. I’d spent years optimizing systems, debugging infrastructure, fixing the things that broke. Now it was me that was broken. I had to trust that the doctors were as good at their job as I was at mine.
[…]
She referred me to a cardiologist and scheduled some additional tests. Then came the doctor’s orders. No running. No alcohol. Minimize stress. Make sure I keep my heart rate under 110 bpm to avoid rapid ventricular response (RVR).
[…]
She suggested talking to a mental health professional, something I had been guilty of stigmatizing my entire life. But I realized I wasn’t just dealing with a heart condition; I was dealing with years of mounting stress and burnout I had refused to acknowledge. It was the first time I finally admitted I couldn’t just willpower my way through it. I needed help managing the stress and regaining focus, and for the first time in my life, I stopped seeing that as weakness.
Getting that support, and the right medications to help quiet and focus my mind, was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Healing isn’t just about fixing your heart; it’s about taking care of your head and everything connected to it.
[…]
Once I got home [from the AWS ‘Heroes’ Summit], I felt as though something had changed. I was suddenly incredibly motivated. I had a much clearer sense of where I wanted to spend my time. Time with family, time with friends, and time for the community that had brought me so much joy in the past.
[…]
This year tore me down. It also rebuilt me.
[…]
After years of optimizing for performance, I’ve started optimizing for balance. We can’t control what life throws at us, but we can choose how we deal with the hand we’re dealt. I’m not religious, but there is something beautiful about the Serenity Prayer. That wisdom to know what can and cannot be changed often comes from lived experience. These last few years have taught me some hard lessons. My hope is that they’ve prepared me for whatever comes next.
Source: Jeremy Daly
Image: Julio Klinger
Members of my family really like the TV show The Traitors. Like much of modern television it doesn’t really have much in the way of a ‘storyline’ but is rather a series of dramatic events; what situationists would call ‘the spectacle’.
Social media has also turned towards the spectacular in recent years in terms of becoming more like television. In this article, Derek Thompson outlines how companies like Meta openly point out this means they’re not really ‘social media’ companies any more as most of their users are watching videos that aren’t created by anyone they actually know.
Going on to cite Neil Postman, Thompson explains that this turn towards short-form video means that “the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol” in a place where “everything is urgent [but] nothing is truly important.” I’m still taking a break from social media at the moment, and even find regular news sources a bit light on stuff I actually need to know about. So I’m thankful of sites like News Minimalist which do a good job of filtering out gossip and low-quality ‘facts’.
You learn a lot about a company when its back is against the wall. This summer, we learned something important about Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. In an antitrust case with the Federal Trade Commission, Meta filed a legal brief on August 6, in which it made a startling claim. Meta cannot possibly be a social media monopoly, Meta said, because it is not really a social media company.
Only a small share of time spent on its social-networking platforms is truly “social” networking—that is, time spent checking in with friends and family. More than 80 percent of time spent on Facebook and more than 90 percent of time spent on Instagram is spent watching videos, the company reported. Most of that time is spent watching content from creators whom the user does not know. From the FTC filing:
Today, only a fraction of time spent on Meta’s services—7% on Instagram, 17% on Facebook—involves consuming content from online “friends” (“friend sharing”). A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are “unconnected”—i.e., not from a friend or followed account—and recommended by AI-powered algorithms Meta developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise, which stalled Meta’s growth.
Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.
[…]
It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.
Source: Derek Thompson
Image: John Burn-Murdoch, via source article
From the hope-for-the-future department comes news that scientists have found that, one day, we might be able to replace silicon with fungi. The idea that we might be able to plug in to the compost heap in our gardens for faster processing speeds sounds very much like a future I’d like to happen.
I note that an article on earth.com suggests an additional benefit of using fungi is their suitable for otherwise inhospitable environments. Apparently they contain a compound called ‘lentinan’ that protects cells from oxidative stress, helping them to endure radiation, temperature shifts, and ultraviolet light. So great for aerospace or deep-space missions where radiation might conventional electronics.
Researchers at The Ohio State University recently discovered that edible fungi, such as shiitake mushrooms, can be cultivated and guided to function as organic memristors. These components act like memory cells that retain information about previous electrical states.
Their experiments showed that mushroom-based devices could reproduce the same kind of memory behavior seen in semiconductor chips. They may also enable the creation of other eco-friendly, brain-like computing tools that cost less to produce.
“Being able to develop microchips that mimic actual neural activity means you don’t need a lot of power for standby or when the machine isn’t being used,” said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “That’s something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage.”
[…]
“Mycelium as a computing substrate has been explored before in less intuitive setups, but our work tries to push one of these memristive systems to its limits,” he said.
[…]
After two months of testing, the researchers found that their mushroom-based memristor could switch between electrical states up to 5,850 times per second with about 90% accuracy. Although performance decreased at higher electrical frequencies, the team noticed that connecting multiple mushrooms together helped restore stability – much like neural connections in the human brain.
[…]
“Everything you’d need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap and some homemade electronics, or as big as a culturing factory with pre-made templates,” said LaRocco. “All of them are viable with the resources we have in front of us now.”
Source & image: Science Daily
I’m not entirely sure how to excerpt this post which is, itself, primarily composed of excerpts. However, what I can say is that you should read it as it contains important things to ponder about orality and literacy.
I think I came across it courtesy of some links shared in the chat/etherpad of a group of us who have kept meeting after collaborating on an AI and the Future of Education UNESCO-related thing earlier this year.
Without being Luddites, some of my dearest friends reject certain elements of modern technology in order to protect their innate abilities. Xu Wenkan, with whom we are well acquainted on Language Log (see special bibliography below), refused to learn how to process sinographs in computers, and he was less liable to character amnesia than any Chinese person I know. I myself do not wish to learn how to “text”. Most astonishing of all, many of my super smart students are writing better by hand this year than their predecessors did in the past few decades. I behold their papers and essays and am breathless at the elegance of their handwritten compositions. I know not what to attribute this felicitous development to.
Another of my closest scholarly friends, Tsu-Lin Mei, resisted computers. Instead, he wrote out his papers on an old mechanical typewriter using Eaton’s Corrasable Bond. Sure, it smudged, but Tsu-Lin was happily and intimately in control of his composition.
Source: Language Log
Image: Jeff Hopper
As I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve started using Are.na again. I love everything about this post by Charles Broskoski, one of the co-founders, who after using the example of the 90s film You’ve Got Mail discusses why, for him, business is personal and doesn’t need to ‘scale’ to meet the needs of investors.
[T]here seems to be both an increasing intolerance for the impersonal and insincere, and a sharper collective radar for the people and companies that fake sincerity. The companies that stand out are the ones who have a particularly high-quality way of doing things. That quality can be traced back to the people who run and work for the company having a deep personal connection to what it is they do. When I started running Are.na with friends 14 years ago, it often felt like having such a personal stake in what we were doing would be a liability. Today it’s often perceived as an asset. I’m not especially pro-capitalism, but I am pro doing something really hard that you care about desperately and unabashedly.
Let’s term these types of businesses a Personal Business… A Personal Business is run by people who are truly into what they are doing, and invested enough to offer products, services, and/or experiences that are both high-quality and idiosyncratic. The type of business that both sustains and is sustained by a community. Think of the bodega down the street that will accept your packages for you, or restaurants that have been in operation for as long as you can remember, or a store that you stop in just to chat. These particular attributes aren’t strategic (though they are strengths). Rather, they arise from the people who run it, who are cool and love what they do. Maybe most importantly, a Personal Business is properly scaled. It doesn’t have to be small, but it should grow at a pace that optimizes for its own resilience rather than to dominate a market.
[…]
Part of what prevents people from starting their own software company is the pervasiveness of a singular popular narrative: the idea that money is the primary reason to do so. That the way to make software profitable is to scale, and the way to scale is to get investment from VCs. Software, for better or for worse, plays an increasingly primary role in determining how we view the world, which in turn determines how the world actually works. There should be more than just one prominent funding model facilitating those experiences. There should be more businesses that represent a diversity of people and potential outcomes. It would be a much better internet if there were.
[…]
When we started working on Are.na, over 14 years ago, the world was mostly in a phase of being enamored with social networks and the potential that they represented. It took a lot of effort at that time to articulate any kind of critique of these new types of businesses (we’ve sold a mug on our online store that reads “Fuck an algorithm” for over 10 years). Now, there’s hardly a single person that wouldn’t admit that the experience of being on most social media leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a broad understanding that “social media might lead to unhealthy outcomes,” but what’s less understood is one of the major forces that led us to this state: the type of funding that requires businesses to (again) scale rapidly or die.
With all this said, I can admit that it’s both terrifying and ridiculously hard to get something off the ground without a major capital infusion. Even with some help in the beginning, it’s taken quite a bit of time to get Are.na to a place of true stability. After our crowdfunding campaign in 2018, there was a period where my budget allotted me essentially two slices of cheap pizza a day. After that, I took up part-time freelancing, which I did until about four years ago, when Are.na’s revenue had grown enough to pay me a livable salary.
My motivation throughout the ups and downs was not that Are.na would one day make me rich, it was that we had to keep Are.na alive because it, the service itself, was part of how I understood (and still understand) myself. Similar to how Kathleen Kelly thought about books, we do not consider Are.na to be a vehicle for profit, we consider it to be a vehicle for self-understanding.
My point is that my reasons for working on Are.na are personal. Our endurance for continuing this work comes from it being personal. Our strength as a business comes from it being personal. And the rewards that I get from this work, and deciding to continue this work, are personal.
Source: Are.na
I discovered this curious article via Arts & Letters Daily which I’ve only recently rediscovered, after I used to visit it, well, daily. The article is a conversation published in The Point between its editors, many of whom attended the Arts and Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. News that they have paused graduate student admissions for all departments, are trying to cut costs, and restructuring caused them to reflect on their own experience, and the importance of a graduate education in the Humanities.
As a graduate of Humanities subjects myself (Philosophy, History, Education) I found it really interesting to read Becca Rothfeld’s contribution. Universities, as I have said before, do not have a right to exist—especially in their current, neoliberal form. That’s not to say I would simply get rid of them, quite the opposite: I think everyone should have space for the kind of contemplation, reflection, and self-development that they can provide.
Although this article is about the US higher education system, my experience is of the UK approach. My parents were paid to go to university, while a generation later I was invoiced a (relatively) small amount for the privilege, and in which now my son is on the hook for a lot more. As other people have said more eloquently than I ever could, this has meant that, over my lifetime, universities have morphed from a public good into a private one. We should do something about that.
Forgive me, Father, for I do not want to have doubts about the academic humanities on the eve of their decimation—but I’m not sure that I will miss the ivory towers when they’re gone, or at least, what I will miss about them strikes me as incidental to their self-conception and their stated aims. I will miss the role they played, often despite themselves, and I will miss the people who populated them, often ambivalently and always in abominable working conditions. And it goes without saying that if the humanities ever ceased to exist, I would not merely “miss them”; I would cease to have a reason for living. But I’m not sure that the humanities could ever vanish—we need them too much, and we perpetuate them too helplessly, just by dint of being the kind of creatures we are—and I’m even less sure that the academy in its present incarnation provides the best forum for their continuation. That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t go to the barricades to protect the ivory tower, now that the philistines are at the gate. Rest assured: I plan to. But I’d rather go to the barricades for something I could stand behind with less trepidation.
What did I love about the university during my decade inside it? I loved the ideal, rarely realized, of an intellectual community—a group of people committed to thinking together rather than competing against one another for a vanishingly small spate of jobs. And I loved the promise, equally notional, that there might be a retreat from worldly preoccupations, a place reserved for thinking, just for the sheer delight of it. Above all, I loved the kind of people the university attracted (and often ended by demoralizing, if not completely destroying): people eager to pore over The World as Will and Representation line by line for over a year, people for whom the life of the mind is a necessity and, more importantly, a joy. And if I didn’t exactly love that academic humanities departments are pretty much the only durable and entrenched institutions in the anglophone world dedicated to the study and preservation of the arts, I knew that it was true. And if I downright hated that so many of us were consigned to conditions of poverty and precarity, I had no choice but to pretend our plight was justified by the project we were jointly committed to maintaining. But was it?
You’re catching me at a moment of acute skepticism. I’ve just returned from teaching at the Matthew Strother Center, a place that’s hard for me to describe in less than half a million words. In brief: five students of all ages and all professions come to a farm in the Catskills, where they stay for a week for free, without their phones or computers. They don’t know in advance what book the faculty will assign them, but they show up anyway. During the day, they work on the farm and attend a three-hour seminar. At night, they participate in “salons”: during our session, we staged a performance of Plato’s Symposium and sang an arrangement that one of the students, a retired choral director and organist in his late sixties, prepared for us. We were not expected to produce anything. The goal was the hardest and best thing in the world: to read a book together and try to understand it.
That book was The Gay Science—which is in large part about the shortcomings of the modern university. Nietzsche describes its resident specialists as “grown into their nook, crumpled beyond recognition, unfree, deprived of their balance, emaciated and angular all over except for one place where they are downright rotund.” I think I know what he means. I’ve taught Nietzsche in the university, and I’ve taught him on a farm in the Catskills, and there is no comparison.
So where does this leave me, a conflicted defender of the university, an academic exile by choice? We need humanistic institutions. The humanities are not the kind of thing we can—or would want to—do alone. But must we content ourselves with the humanistic institutions we have? Yet it isn’t obvious that the model of the Center could ever be scaled up to accommodate a whole nation, and it certainly is obvious that any broadscale change in humanistic education is a lamentably long way off. For now, for better or for worse (and I’m often convinced it’s very much for worse), the university is the best we have. I love it; I hate it; I resent that I need it. I wouldn’t miss it if it vanished—but of course, I also would.
Source: The Point
Image: Alisa Anton
I don’t have much time for Paul Kingsnorth, whose new book is the subject of this review by John Gray in New Statesman. But Gray’s review is itself interesting for the thoughts generated by his reading of Kingsnorth’s essays.
In particular, I found the following a concise, clear-eyed description of the world that is being shaped for us and we have no choice but to inhabit.
Instead of human-to-human relationships, our lives consist ever more of interactions with machines. The options we have in entertainment, the arts and consumer goods have expanded enormously – but what we watch, listen to and buy are algorithmically regulated commodities, increasingly generated by AI. Much of the food we eat is no longer produced by human-scale farms and reaches us processed and packaged from distant mega-corporations. What is still human in our lives lingers on in the interstices of a vast inhuman mechanism.
Source: New Statesman
Well, indeed. A company that is allegedly so close to AGI does not bother spending time ensuring that adults can create erotica while releasing an AI-enabled web browser based on another company’s technology. It all seems a little desperate.
I code sites for a living (allegedly), and I honestly cannot overstate how uninterested I am in all these new browsers. Because these are not new browsers: these are Chromium frames with AI slapped on top.
The thing I found more interesting about the whole OpenAI announcement was Sam Altman tweeting: «10 am livestream today to launch a new product I’m quite excited about!». This is coming from someone who’s allegedly running a company that’s building a tool that should usher in a new era where computers will replace most of human work, where we’ll all have a super intelligence always available in our pockets, ready to dispense infinite wisdom.
And yet he’s quite excited about a fucking Chromium installation with AI slapped on top of it. I guess building an actual browser, from scratch, is still a task so monumentally difficult that even a company that is aiming for super-intelligence can’t tackle it.
Source: Manuel Moreale
I’d argue that much of what Tom Watson talks about in these four thought-provoking posts (AI summaries below) relates to my work on ambiguity — especially my article On the strategic uses of ambiguity. There’s also a good dose of systems thinking in there, too.
People as Code (Part 1) Tom Watson’s opening essay argues that society could re‑organise itself using the same collaborative, modular logic that drives open‑source software. By treating “people as code,” he imagines communities and organisations as contributors to a shared repository of social infrastructure, building frameworks that evolve through openness, documentation, and iteration. Borrowing from the culture of digital development, he urges philanthropy and the social purpose sector to act as maintainers of systems where people co‑create and adapt the “source code” of collective good rather than operating in isolation.
People as Code 2 – Collapse, Rewild, Regenerate This follow‑up re‑examines the original optimism through the lens of generative AI’s cultural saturation. Watson warns that algorithmic convergence and efficiency culture flatten creativity and produce brittle systems, both digital and organisational. Using the metaphor of a forest ecosystem, he advocates for “rewilding” our sectors—embracing plurality, slowness, and relational infrastructures more like mycelial networks than monocultures. His call to “keep a little wildness in the loop” positions regeneration, uncertainty, and imperfection as essential design principles for sustainable systems.
People as Code 3 – Quantum Uncertainty Extending the series’ metaphoric vocabulary, this essay draws from quantum theory to explore how embracing uncertainty can help organisations remain responsive and creative in complex environments. Just as particles exist in superposition until observed, Watson suggests that ideas and social systems should be allowed to remain indeterminate long enough for new possibilities to emerge. He frames quantum uncertainty as an ethical stance—one that resists premature definition and instead values curiosity, multiplicity, and relational dynamics over predictability.
People as Code 4 – Entropic Systems The final piece introduces entropy as a metaphor for organisational vitality. Instead of treating disorder as decay, Watson views it as the precondition for renewal and learning. He suggests designing “entropic systems” that can adapt, self‑balance, and evolve through cycles of breakdown and regeneration, much like living ecologies. In practical terms, this means loosening control, distributing agency, and regarding instability not as failure but as evidence of life within complex, evolving networks.
The problem, of course, is that ‘rewilding’ means “consciously doing something different than what we’re doing now” and I don’t think that as a society we have the reflective apparatus to allow that to happen. We live in extremely shallow times. As Tom says in the second article, “Everyone planting the same crops of “impact frameworks,” all aiming for growth, all tending the same metrics of success.”
Image: Suzanne Rushton
This interview with AA Cavia, a “philosopher of computation” is a tough read in places as it’s so semantically dense. Nevertheless, this section I’ve excerpted at the end makes a really good point: what counts as ‘creativity’ changes over time, and future creativity is likely to involve significant amounts of AI.
That means instead of Luddism, we need to find other ways of organising against Capital. Not trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
This decentering of the human should not be conflated with dehumanizing tendencies that center capital, empire or the war machine over human welfare. It’s instead an invitation to develop new norms with which we can rethink the human and its place in our intellectual tradition, so I see it as a political project with emancipatory potential.
Seen through this lens, AI is a project of transition of the human, a transgression encoded into its origins in Turing’s imitation game, a test which machines should not be seen to pass, but which instead humans are inevitably set up to fail. And in this failure of self-recognition I see some positive potential. In this sense, the only alignment problem I think we should be tending to is that between humanity and capital, a conflict in which computation has been weaponised.
In this regard, I reject narratives which posit a total subsumption of computation, or indeed any paradigmatic technology, under capital. If we look at the backlash against AI, which pits human creativity against generative models, it appears to be guided by archaic notions of creativity, which suffer from residues of said twentieth century humanism. As a result of this discourse, Luddism is rampant, particularly in the academic left. Even a cursory reading of the philosophy of technology, take Simondon’s discussion on the dualism of organism and mechanism as taken up by Yuk Hui, will suggest a completely different way of approaching such questions.
The notion of authorship has been shifting continuously throughout human history of course, and the answer is never to down tools and protect what we have, but rather to forge new tools.
As creative practitioners, there are many ways I think we should be organizing against capital, including new ownership and rights models, but Luddism isn’t one of them. The history of art and the history of technology are one and the same; they are intricately braided. Without the invention of a technique such as oil painting we wouldn’t have Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Art is hatched in that friction between human experience and technical practices. On this point I would take heed of Rimbaud’s advice: one must be absolutely modern.
If contemporary reality feels like a season in hell, the only exit to be found is in beating a path through the wildfires of postmodernity to new technicities.
Source: Le Random
Image: Elise Racine
Nathan Rice’s argument in this piece is that AI is, effectively, a proxy war with China and that the US is way behind. As a result — for many, reasons, including ego, the Silicon Valley AI companies' profits are being guaranteed by the American taxpayer.
That’s a dangerous bet, especially when (as he points out near the start of the article) that “If it wasn’t for AI investments, it’s likely the United States would be in a recession right now.” I don’t think that AI is going to completely transform economies in the timeframe that boosters are talking about and, therefore, agree with Rice that the deflation or bursting of the bubble is going to be very tough.
I just hope that we, in the UK (and Europe) have the good sense to realise that good things happen slowly and bad things happen fast.
Between Elon Musk, David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, Peter Thiel and his acolyte J.D. Vance, Trump has been sold the story that AI dominance is a strategic asset of vital importance to national security (there’s probably also a strong ego component, America needs “the best AI, such a beautiful AI”). I’m not speculating, this is clearly written into the BBB and the language of multiple executive orders. These people think AI is the last thing humans will invent, and the first person to have it will reap massive rewards until the other powers can catch up. As such, they’re willing to bend the typical rules of capitalism. Think of this as the early stages of a wartime economy.
[…]
How much of a “war” this is is debatable; if you think we’re going to reach peak AI with GPT6, it’s a nothingburger, but if you believe AI is the next industrial revolution, that framing is fairly accurate, as failure to adapt would be an economically existential threat. The Chinese will not pull back on AI investment, and because of their advantages in robotics and energy infrastructure, they don’t have to. Unlike us, they’re able to do it sustainably. US households don’t have sufficient surplus income to support consumer robotics at scale and our industrial base is likely insuffient to drive robotics investments at the scale required, and with the administration’s crusade against solar energy and America’s unwillingness to build nuclear power, we’re at a crippling disadvantage in the energy race. We have a head start in AI, but China can train for less, soon they’ll have more training capacity, and they’ll be able to use their lead in robotics to capture far more economic value from AI than we will. That means the longer the AI race drags on, the more likely China is to beat us. The people in power aren’t willing to risk that outcome, and they’ve been bewitched by the idea of being the only ones to have superintelligence, so they’re willing to go all-in to win big and fast.
[…]
Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn’t, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom. When I say magic here, I mean it; because of the ~38T national debt bomb, a big boost is not enough. If AI doesn’t completely transform our economy, the massive capital misallocation combined with the national debt is going to cause our economy to implode.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic calling out a future of brutal serfdom. Keep in mind we basically have widespread serfdom now; a big chunk of Americans are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. The only thing keeping it from being official is the lack of debtor’s prison. Think about how much worse things will be with 10% inflation, 25% unemployment and the highest income inequality in history. This is fertile ground for a revolution, and historically the elites would have taken a step back to try and make the game seem less rigged as a self-preservation tactic, but this time is different. As far as I can tell, the tech oligarchs don’t care because they’re banking on their private island fortresses and an army of terminators to keep the populace in line.
Source: Sibylline Software
This is a long and very good post by Alex Evans, whose main concern is the voluntary and charity sector (VCS). Although he goes on to give a potted history of the Black Death and feudalism, as well as outlining the promise of universal basic income, it’s his analysis of what’s happening with freelancers and the diminishing middle class in the UK which interests me.
Pre-pandemic, and pre-Brexit things were much better. Every time I meet up with people who are freelancers, part of worker co-ops, etc. the conversation quickly turns to the same thing: what’s going on? I’ve variously blamed: AI, the number of elections in 2024, over-hiring during the pandemic, Brexit, and the super-rich hoarding money.
The truth is, it’s probably all of those things and more. But I think that Evans is correct to say that the VCS is the canary in the coalmine for the next recession. 2025 has been terrible but let’s hope that next year isn’t even worse…
What we’re watching in the voluntary sector mirrors patterns across the wider economy: the disappearance of mid-level roles, the rise of short-term contracts, and the quiet normalisation of insecurity as the price of ‘flexibility’. As ever, I’m not so interested in the ‘inside baseball’ trade talk. I’m much more interested in how this maps to wider changes in our society, economy, and culture. For some time, there has been a hollowing out of middle incomes in the West - people in clerical, skilled manufacturing jobs. In the VCS this seems to be expanding further up the tree and into senior roles. I think we are canaries in the mineshaft of the next recession (or even crash) likely to engulf the wider economy before long.
[…]
[T]here’s always a danger that we welcome a new flexibility without noticing that much of this is a result of massive sector contraction. Some people are finding that there is no longer an alternative, as restricted funding, refusal to pay for management costs, and wider cuts risk creating a new precariat where managers/ specialists used to have job security. Others - especially fundraisers & CEOs - are fleeing toxic burnout cultures.
[…]
The new precarious middle classes have been the subject of concern for commentators and economists for some time. And it is likely that this sense of increased anxiety and middle class precarity adds to the rise of voting for right wing parties in groups who might normally find them rather too déclassé. When you lose a property owning middle class, more and more of that wealth is sucked up to the super-wealthy. Economists and popular economic commentators like Gary Stevenson have warned about the hollowing out of the middle classes, as resources get siphoned out of the working and middle classes and into an ever-increasing share of wealth for the super-wealthy, whether corporate or individual.
[…]
A recent study by the OECD shows that the middle classes, faced with stagnant incomes and rising costs, are becoming less able to save and falling into debt. We also know that home ownership is becoming less and less likely for even middle class households. Of course the ‘middle class’ is constantly shifting, and has many nooks and crannies, and levels of wealth, autonomy, power and privilege. Where it begins and ends is a constant source of debate and discussion. And many would point out that most of the people who we describe as ‘middle class’ in the UK are in actual fact, much like in the US, really ‘working class’. They may have the trappings of respectability, perhaps some savings, may (decreasingly) own their own home, or may have been to university, but as the OECD points out, all of those things are being erased. We’re seeing downward social mobility over the generations (I’ve seen this in my own family). And the fundamental of having to sell labour to those who extract profit is an economic characteristic of most ‘middle class’ experiences, until we reach the upper limits where we may find those who have invested in property, or enjoy some level of hereditary wealth.
Source: Barely Civil Society
Image: Vitaly Gariev
The way I found out about this morning’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage was when my Signal messages wouldn’t send. We had to use Google Meet instead of Zoom for our weekly WAO meeting but everything was working again by lunchtime.
Still, it’s a reminder that not only is a huge infrastructure build-out such as AWS a single point of failure, they’re also an easy way for those that wish to control the internet to do so.
A massive cloud outage stemming from Amazon Web Services’ key US-EAST-1 region, its hub in northern Virginia, near the US Capitol, caused widespread disruptions of websites and platforms around the world on Monday morning. Amazon’s main ecommerce platform and other properties, including Ring doorbells and the Alexa smart assistant, suffered interruptions and outages throughout the morning, as did Meta’s communication platform WhatsApp, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, PayPal’s Venmo payment platform, multiple web services from Epic Games, multiple British government sites, and many others.
[…]
AWS has suffered other large-scale outages, including a major incident in 2023. Reliance on central cloud services from giants like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Services has, in may ways, improved cybersecurity and stability around the world by creating a baseline of guardrails and best practices for all customers. But this standardization comes with major trade-offs, because the platforms become a single point of failure for large swaths of critical services.
Source: WIRED
Image: israel palacio
I love this from Dan Sinker, who together with his co-host Maureen Johnson, has just put out the 400th episode of their podcast Says Who — which they’d only planned to run for eight episodes!
Side note: I miss recording a podcast. While I’ve put out a few microcasts recently, there’s nothing like having a co-host! It’s been a year since Laura and I put out a season of The Tao of WAO
When times are hard—and they were then and they sure as shit are now—one of the best things you can do is build things with your friends. Build things that can help people get through it, even if that just means you. Because it almost always isn’t just you. Put your things out in the world, let them help the people they can help. You never know where it might lead.
Source: Dan Sinker
Image: Katarzyna Pypla
The latest issue of New Philosopher magazine is on the theme of ‘Emotion’ so, as you can imagine, there’s quite a few mentions of Stoic philosophers. However, I want to share three parts which really struck a chord with me. Together, they’ve helped me reflect on the relationship between my moods and emotions (which I seem to feel quite strongly compared to some people) and philosophy — which is usually considered as a cold, rational pursuit.
The first is from Antonia Case’s essay entitled ‘The Meaning of Moods’ (p.19-20) in which she talks about the importance of matching what you read with your current mood:
Moods are mysterious because they aren’t necessarily tied to anything specific, nor can we reliably predict which mood will show up. You might wake up to a beautiful sunny day — it’s Sunday, with nothing much planned — and you feel a brooding unrest.
[…]
Philosopher Lars Svendsen, in Moods and the Meaning of Philosophy, argues that philosophy always begins in mood. Our mood prompt the questions we ask.
[…]
Svendsen ponders why certain philosophers speak to us more powerfully than others. He admits he has never felt quite “at home” in Spinoza’s writings as he has with Kant or Wittgenstein. Despite understanding Spinoza intimately and lecturing on his work, he wonders: “Could it be that I have simply failed to enter these texts in the proper mood?” Not only is a philosophyical text infused with the mood of its author; when we read it, we too approach it in a particular mood. “If your mood and the mood of the text are at odds, there is the risk that the text simply will not ‘speak’ to you,” Svendsen observes.
The next extract is from Tom Chatfield’s piece ‘Happiness, quantified’ (p.34) where, along with reflecting on some Buddhist wisdom about ‘aliveness’, he discusses how all emotions are part of who we are:
[T]he lesson I struggle to teach my children — because I am also struggling to learn it myself — is that the sadness and anger can be as appropriate and important as the love and joy. They are not enemies to be overcome or data to be processed, but part of who we are. The trick is not to will or wish them away, but to notice them (to be fair, the Inside Out movies help with this one).
The final thing I want to share is from an interview with the psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (p.85) who shares some really interesting insights about the granularity of categories in which we place our emotions:
Granularity is really about the capacity to construct categories that are specifically tailored to the situation that you are in… [W]hen your brain is predicting, it is remembering the past, past instances that are similar to the present. It’s constructing a category. A category is a group of things which are similar enough to each other to be interchangeable or to be used for the same function. So your brain is always constructing categories on the fly, instantaneously or extemporaneously. And the ability to construct a category in a very situated way for a specific purpose is the concept of emotional granularity. Granularity is not about labelling; it’s about what you do and feel. Is the instance of emotion specific enough to the situation that you can engage in a behaviour that will allow you to function well in that situation.
I mean, when you feel like shit, what do you do when you feel like shit? That’s not a very specific category, right? If somebody has a single category for anger, that’s not very helpful, because in our culture, an instance of anger can be unpleasant or pleasant. Anger can involve physical movement or remaining still. Sometimes you shout in anger. Sometimes you smile in anger. Sometimes you sit quiety and plot the demise of your enemy of anger. The evidence shows that blood pressure can rise, fall, or stay the same in anger. The variation is not random. It is structured by the situation and the categories your brain is capable of making. The predictions that your brain makes when it’s constructing an instance of anger begin with allostasis, which support skeletomotor movements and give rise to felt experience.
So, basically, the more granular you are, the more tailored your actions and emotional experience will be to the specific situations you are in, the more varied your emotional life will be. On the other hand, too much specificity — and not enough generalisation — is also not helpful. So, it’s a metabolic balancing act: categories with too much generalisation are not helpful, and categories that are too specific are not helpful. There’s a sweet spot between simplification and complexity in emotional life.
Source: New Philosopher magazine
Image: Nik
If you want people to pay attention to your ideas these days, you really need to put things in video format. Ideally one that less than 30 seconds long and includes something funny or unexpected. It helps with the algorithm.
At the end of last year, The Economist published an article entitled Are adults forgetting how to read? which concluded “You do not need a first-rate mind to sense trouble ahead.” Stowe Boyd riffs on this and, like me, resists the temptation to ‘pivot’ to video with every fibre of his being.
The decline of literacy and the eclipse of reading, combined with algorithmic feeds breaking the ‘traditional’ follower model of the blogosphere and pre-TikTok social media, may be the death of newsletters, and ultimately, writing.
[…]
In the near term, while the streams of video and AI slop seemingly are clogging every available orifice in the body public, I will continue living the writing life, even if it doesn’t lead to fame or fortune.
Source: workfutures.io
Image: Thomas Franke
I like things that come in threes, and this in particular seems like a useful heuristic for helping categorise a change process. Emily Webber riffs on an original idea by James Clear: is this like a hat, a haircut, or a tattoo?
The language that I tend to use with clients around this, informed by Sociocracy is whether a proposal or idea is “good enough for now, and safe enough to try.” Going forward, I think I might couple that with these metaphors.
Most decisions are like hats. Try one and if you don’t like it, put it back and try another. The cost of a mistake is low; the decision is made quickly and can be easily reversed. Teams should be able to make these on their own and share the results fairly quickly.
[…]
Some decisions are like haircuts. You can fix a bad one, but reversing it can take some effort, and you might need to live with it for a while.
[…]
A few decisions are like tattoos. Once you make them, you have to live with them. Reversing them would be very expensive and painful, and not always possible.
Source & image: Emily Webber
I just wanted to express full agreement and solidarity with Stephen Downes' view of how and why we should put things on the internet (emphasis added).
“The open web is under attack by AI bots that steal web publishers' content,” writes Nate Hake on some travel blog site. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but it’s referenced by Paul Prinsloo and is yet another article referencing an imaginary ‘social contract’ that is violated by AI. “In the past,” writes Hake, “search engines and platforms sent real human users to websites. Today, they increasingly send AI bots instead.” But search engine traffic matters only if you run advertisements on your site; for people like me, the traffic sent by Google, say, is just traffic I have to pay for. That’s why I’m happy to syndicate my site on RSS and social media; it’s good for me if people read my stuff elsewhere. So I don’t mind if AI bots crawl my site (provided they don’t amount to a DOS attack) and my only real desire would be to have AI credit me with an idea if it happens to originate with me. But even this isn’t part of any ‘social contract’. Sure, if you don’t want AI to crawl your site, block it (or turn over control of the internet to Cloudflare, your call). To me, sharing the ideas is what counts, and sharing is not transactional and not based on any social contract.
Source: Downes.ca
Image: Gaku Suyama
‘Dead internet theory’ is a conspiracy theory which, like most conspiracy theories, is based on a vibe and a kernel of truth rather than anything resembles actual fact. It asserts that “since around 2016 the Internet has consisted mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, as part of a coordinated and intentional effort to control the population and minimize organic human activity.”
When you see videos like this one, however, you realise that — especially on some social networks — there is a lot of algorithmic manipulation. However, it’s more to do with influence (commercial, political) than “controlling the population” and relies, like most things, on economic incentives to act in a particular way.
Source: Reddit
I was going to spend some time writing a detailed blog post about a new report from the Digital Badging Commission entitled From skills to growth: A plan for digital badging in the UK. But instead of damning it with faint praise, I’ve decided that all I’ve got to say fits into some basic traffic light feedback:
🟢 It’s good that the report stresses the importance of open standards and interoperability, and suggests that various official bodies explore using badges. 🟡 It seems there’s a fundamental conflation of quality assurance and technical validation (the word ‘registry’ suggests the latter but explicitly used in the context of the former). Also, using terminology (CLR, LER) which is only really used in the US really muddies the water for the reader. 🔴 Despite language of empowerment and recognition towards the start of the report, the third recommendation merely cements the status quo of ‘vetted providers’ being the providers of ‘skills.’
I got involved in Open Badges 14 years ago because of the standard’s revolutionary, decentralised potential. The various iterations and improvements have already led to massive innovation across the world with hundreds of millions of badges being issued each year. The role of official bodies is therefore coordination not imposition.
TL;DR: I think the first two recommendations are… fine. It’s the third one which I think is problematic.
The Digital Badging Commission’s recommendations directly address the current gaps in trust, coordination and infrastructure outlined above. Our recommendations align with government ambitions around digital transformation, skills reform and economic growth. If implemented, together they will unlock the full potential of capabilities, knowledge, skills and behaviours across the UK workforce and ensure that digital badges enable a robust, future-facing credentialing ecosystem, driving stronger growth and higher productivity.
[…]
1. Digital badges and credentials should be integrated into post-16 formal education and training Digital badges and credentials should be integrated as a core feature of lifelong learning programmes, including within the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) and Skills Bootcamps, to ensure the system is fit for a modern, dynamic economy. This would allow learners and employees to clearly demonstrate a broader and more work-relevant range of competencies – including functional, technical and transferable skills – that are critical for economic growth. This will directly support the government’s ambition to better align learning with labour market needs, while boosting learner engagement, motivation and progression. Employers will gain faster, more reliable insights into what individuals can do, enabling smarter hiring and making the skills system more responsive, efficient and productive.
2. A national skills wallet should be established that supports lifelong learning, using interoperable open standards Governments across the UK should develop a national skills wallet that is accessible to all, building upon existing formal digital education records. This wallet should initially hold formal qualifications for young people leaving school (eg GCSEs and A levels) and be available (unpopulated) to adults already in the workforce. Crucially, the wallet must use open standards to integrate easily with existing proprietary skills wallets, digital education transcripts, credential systems and emerging digital identity tools. Learners will be able to export qualifications from it and digital badges and professionally recognised certifications into it. Such a wallet, linked to the GOV.UK One Login, will provide a trusted means to unlock lifelong skills recognition and support clearer pathways through education and employment.
3. A national registry for digital credential quality assurance should be established A national registry for digital credential quality assurance is now essential to ensure consistency, comparability and credibility across digital badges and credentials. It should provide transparent frameworks, nationally recognised standards, and easily accessible guidance for employers, learners, and credential and wallet providers. This will create the trusted infrastructure required for a scalable and secure digital credentialing ecosystem – one that can underpin government ambitions for a more agile and skills-led economy.
Source: Digital Badging Commission
I can’t say that I have the same response to the ‘voltage of the age’ as Jay does, but I recognise the reference to Tennyson. My anxiety, which I’m also dealing with, makes me want to withdraw and let other people figure it out. There’s only so much storm my small boat can take.
Every single day right now it seems like I’m waking up in the morning to some new piece of bullshit. Some new AI thing, some new crypto thing happening, some new insane crypto AND AI thing, politics is mad, war is happening and only going to get worse every where, a genocide is playing out in full view of the world, biosphere collapse, the news of AMOK collapse risk, there is no end to the horrors.
The sea is so very big and my boat is so very small.
But what a time to be alive, to be living though all of this, inside the churn.
It’s not that I want any of this to happen. It’s just can help but watch. As I said to someone the other day, my body keeps registering the ‘voltage of the age‘. Translating my former feelings of anxiety into something like exhilaration from the acceleration around me.
[…]
The only response to this whole unfolding crisis is to stay fully awake inside the gyre. To resist being programmed into unawareness even as the slop machine churns out it’s dreams. We may not be able to slow the velocity of the ongoing circle, but we can at least pay attention to the circle itself, not it’s products. We can name the feeling as ‘voltage of the age’, and refuse to forget that we are in fact still here, alive, and can care for one another, as it’s all happening right now.
Source: thejaymo
Image: Thomas Kelley
Everyone works differently, which becomes evident when you observe writers' favourite writing spots. In this post, the author Warren Ellis talks about his idea space which doesn’t have to be ordered, tagged, and categorised.
One of the reasons I put so much stuff on the web rather than into notebooks or files that only I can access is that it’s often easier to search a keyword plus my name to remind myself what I’ve said over the years.
Also, to me at least, serendipity is more important than categorising everything perfectly. I know what I’m like: I’d end up re-categorising things endlessly…
I’m assembling a little idea space I want to do some work in. For other people, I suppose this is like moodboarding – and I always encourage artists to show me their moodboards for the areas they’re currently interested in. For me, it’s a bit more messy and cobwebby. It’s what I want to talk about and how I want to talk about it. There’s no method, protocol, routine or discipline beyond making myself sit with an open notebook and thinking into it. Which also involves searching my memory. Sorting through the calamitous disarray of drawers and cupboards in my head for bits of films and half-remembered lines and barely recalled posters and graphics. It is the opposite of a memory palace. Not at all a wunderkammer. Anyone who’s seen my actual physical office will get the idea. Weirdly, I discover things better when they’re all over the place. And I accumulate a hundred new things into the piles every day, and covet more.
Source: Warren Ellis
Image: Nechirwan Kavian
I’m taking this week off social networks, which for me means Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn. I’ve realised it really doesn’t help with my anxiety to be bombarded with endless stuff about AI, war, and spicy takes about the latest online drama.
As this article by James O’Sullivan in NOEMA discusses, the dream of mass social media has ended and we now live in its ruins. Engagement is down, yet most people get their “news” from social media. We live in a very strange world where people realise what they consume isn’t reliable but do so anyway.
Coincidentally, I’d spent some time reacquainting myself with Are.na earlier today before reading this post. It influenced my design of MoodleNet, the digital commons where communities curated collections of resources. What I like about Are.na is that it’s ‘social’ while still being appropriately weird and not focused on influence.
See also Bonfire from the remnants of the MoodleNet team and which, unlike Are.na, is part of the Fediverse. We should decide who we want to be first, and then choose our tools and networks based on that choice, rather than the other way around.
The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.
[…]
While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren’t connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they’re just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.
And much of it is slop: Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as “mostly reliable”— down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s. Young adults register the steepest collapse, which is unsurprising; as digital natives, they better understand that the content they scroll upon wasn’t necessarily produced by humans. And yet, they continue to scroll.
The timeline is no longer a source of information or social presence, but more of a mood-regulation device, endlessly replenishing itself with just enough novelty to suppress the anxiety of stopping. Scrolling has become a form of ambient dissociation, half-conscious, half-compulsive, closer to scratching an itch than seeking anything in particular. People know the feed is fake, they just don’t care.
[…]
These networks once promised a single interface for the whole of online life: Facebook as social hub, Twitter as news‑wire, YouTube as broadcaster, Instagram as photo album, TikTok as distraction engine. Growth appeared inexorable. But now, the model is splintering, and users are drifting toward smaller, slower, more private spaces, like group chats, Discord servers and federated microblogs — a billion little gardens.
[…]
But the old practices are still evident: Substack is full of personal brands announcing their journeys, Discord servers host influencers disguised as community leaders and Patreon bios promise exclusive access that is often just recycled content. Still, something has shifted. These are not mass arenas; they are clubs — opt-in spaces with boundaries, where people remember who you are. And they are often paywalled, or at least heavily moderated, which at the very least keeps the bots out. What’s being sold is less a product than a sense of proximity, and while the economics may be similar, the affective atmosphere is different, smaller, slower, more reciprocal. In these spaces, creators don’t chase virality; they cultivate trust.
[…]
This isn’t about making platforms needlessly cumbersome but about distinguishing between helpful constraints and extractive ones. Consider Are.na, a non-profit, ad-free creative platform founded in 2014 for collecting and connecting ideas that feels like the anti-Pinterest: There’s no algorithmic feed or engagement metrics, no trending tab to fall into and no infinite scroll. The pace is glacial by social media standards. Connections between ideas must be made manually, and thus, thoughtfully — there are no algorithmic suggestions or ranked content.
[…]
[T]here is a possible future where a user, upon opening an app, is asked how they would like to see the world on a given day. They might choose the serendipity engine for unexpected connections, the focus filter for deep reads or the local lens for community news. This is technically very achievable — the data would be the same; the algorithms would just need to be slightly tweaked — but it would require a design philosophy that treats users as citizens of a shared digital system rather than cattle. While this is possible, it can feel like a pipe dream.
Source: NOEMA
Image: Daria Nepriakhina
This diagram has been shared multiple times in the networks of which I’m part, but I’m mainly including it here as a form of bookmarking for future reference. There have been plenty of articles about AI being a ‘bubble’ this week but as Stowe Boyd points out, “even if there is an AI bust in the near-term, it doesn’t mean there won’t be an AI-dominated economy in the future.”
Never before has so much money been spent so rapidly on a technology that, for all its potential, remains largely unproven as an avenue for profit-making. And often, these investments can be traced back to two leading firms: Nvidia and OpenAI. The recent wave of deals and partnerships involving the two are escalating concerns that an increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom. At stake is virtually every corner of the economy, with the hype and buildout of AI infrastructure rippling across markets, from debt and equity to real estate and energy.
The companies, which ignited an AI investment frenzy three years ago, have been instrumental in keeping it going by inking large and sometimes overlapping partnerships with cloud providers, AI developers and other startups in the sector. In the process, they’re now seen as playing a key role in ratcheting up the risks of a possible AI bubble by inflating the market and binding the fates of numerous companies together. OpenAI alone has now struck AI computing deals with Nvidia, AMD and Oracle Corp. that altogether could easily top $1 trillion. Meanwhile, the AI startup is burning through cash and doesn’t expect to be cash-flow positive until near the end of the decade.
Source & image: Bloomberg
I spent a lot of Friday working through the ramifications of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) for a client. Although I’m sure the OSA wasn’t designed as such, it’s likely to have a chilling effect on free speech as it places so much of a burden on those running community platforms.
As a result, I should imagine that, instead of using Open Source software and creating a bespoke environment, many groups will end up using platforms provided by larger tech companies. This means their users will be subject to whatever age verification process that the tech company has chosen.
In the case of Discord, which is used by many communities, that means biometric details. It’s pretty bad that a hack has meant the leak of these details. Of course, the best thing is not to store these centrally in the first place.
Critics will assume that this is another reason not to push ahead with digital ID. But, actually, the opposite is true. Legislation such as the OSA means that providers have to implement solutions that store copies of things like passport details. With government-provided digital IDs, it’s actually the identifier that is held centrally: the biometrics stay on your device.
Some countries, including the UK, require social media and messaging providers to carry out age checks to ensure child safety. In the UK this has been the case since July under the Online Safety Act. Cybersecurity experts have warned of a risk that some providers of such checks, which can require government IDs, are becoming hacker targets with bad actors aware of the high volume of sensitive data.
“Recently, we discovered an incident where an unauthorised party compromised one of Discord’s third-party customer service providers,” Discord said in a statement. “The unauthorised party then gained access to information from a limited number of users who had contacted Discord through our customer support and/or trust and safety teams … Of the accounts impacted globally, we have identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government ID photos exposed, which our vendor used to review age-related appeals.”
Source: The Guardian
Image: Evgeniy Alyoshin
From jet lag to gene editing, this article has a list of things that shows how different humanity is now from previous generations. We know all of this, but when you put it all in one place it’s pretty eye-opening.
When things seem so negative in the world, it’s worth reminding ourselves that we’ve actually never had it so good.
If the history of humanity were condensed into a single 24-hour day, this is roughly what it would look like:
- The Hunter-Gatherer Age—23 hours and 3 minutes
- The Agrarian Age—55 minutes and 32 seconds
- The Industrial Age—1 minute and 17 seconds
- The Information Age—11 seconds
More than half of the world’s population is under the age of 30, meaning that the majority of humans alive today have only lived in those 11 seconds—an era that is, without question, the weirdest period in human history.
Consider, for example, this observation, conveyed by the Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven: “the average citizen lives more comfortably now than kings did a few centuries ago.”
A Snickers and a power shower would blow Henry VIII’s mind.
This morning, I woke up in a supremely comfortable bed, knowing there would be no deadly predators or pests to eat or infect me. With cheap soaps and pristine, hot water, I became cleaner in five minutes than was possible for any human—no matter how wealthy—in the past.
Source: The Garden of Forking Paths
Image: Loris Boulinguez
This is a very well-written and insightful piece from James Vincent in The Baffler. It’s about agency and AI, with the punchline being an extension of something I posted about earlier this year in We’re all below the AI line except for a very very very small group of wealthy white men.
The reminder that ‘you can just do things’ feels empowering and emancipatory, foregrounding our ability to make change in the world. However, what it leaves out is the systemic issues that plague our world and—in a world increasingly mediated by AI—feels somewhat like a taunt by the haves to the have-nots.
Some people do things, others have things done to them. The important thing to remember is that sometimes your ability to act in the world is constrained by things beyond your ability to change.
On a personal level the principle that you can just do things is, in my opinion, broadly true, admirable, and helpful. It’s a reminder that we’re frequently constrained as much by our own imagination than by external factors, and that action—any action—is often preferable to overthinking and paralysis. You could try to trace the history of this idea, but it’s so broad that it resists meaningful narrative. It’s simply a truism of the human condition that has been framed and reframed by successive generations. You can find echoes everywhere from the aphorisms of Epictetus (“Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. . . . How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be?”) to the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”). But while in its simplest form the notion of just doing things has no set ideology (apart from a vague sense of libertarianism), its current vogue exemplifies specific political and social trends. More specifically, it speaks to a pessimism about society’s capacity to improve itself; throwing responsibility back on the individual, like the “entrepreneur of the self” described by Michel Foucault.
[…]
More broadly, the valorization of “agency” is also an adaptation to a crumbling social system which no longer offers support or meaning to the individual. This usage is a rebranding of established neoliberal thought: if you are struggling in life, if you’re anxious or lonely or can’t afford the rent, it’s because you are simply not being agentic, you’re not trying enough. In this framing, social challenges become the responsibility of the individual, and collective responses are framed as a form of moral infirmity. (“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” as Musk put it.) The only real change is that the stakes have increased. Instead of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, walking round local businesses with a pile of résumés till you get a job, you should bootstrap your own billion-dollar business. After all, the tools are all there, so why not show a little bit of agency?
The irony is that while political and technological developments are encouraging people to “just do things,” these same developments are making human agency harder to exercise, particularly with regard to AI. In the cultural realm, the replacement of artistic choice by AI tools means removing a level of intent and decision-making. A filmmaker might, in the past, have carefully considered how to light, frame, and block a certain shot; in the future, AI will make these decisions instead, drawing its decisions from a weighted average of its training data. In online spaces, arguments are now ceded to AI adjudicators. On X, the cry of “Grok, is this true?” is slowly taking over from human debate (even though it’s clear that one highly agentic individual, Elon Musk, has his finger on the scales when it comes to Grok’s opinions). Even worse, people trying to make a specific point don’t even bother to formulate the argument themselves. They just get machines to justify their thoughts for them.
[…]
Everywhere we look, the world is ceding control to automatic systems that cannot be reasoned with like humans and whose decisions are often inscrutable, interrogated only after the damage has been done. The delegation of such responsibility is often embraced in the name of efficiency or neutrality, but can also be manipulated by those in power while disenfranchising the masses. This is, perhaps, the real reason that so many people are keen to tell one another that “you can just do things.” It’s a reaction to a world in which, instead, things are just done to us.
Source: The Baffler
Image: Daniel K Cheung
Some thoughts on skills taxonomies, skills ontologies, and learning pathways in an ever-changing world. Although I didn’t mention them in the microcast, the following posts are relevant.
Transcript
Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist whose article in The Guardian does a great job of describing depression. I’ve described most of what I’ve gone through recently as ‘anxiety’ but the truth is that the SNRIs I’ve started work for depression, too. They tend to go hand-in-hand.
Sarner starts the article by talking about her own emotions about a cancelled holiday, and finishes by talking about motherhood. But this middle section about not being able to “press CTRL-Z” on life really resonated with me. We can’t go back to be the people we were before, and we shouldn’t expect others too, either.
What we can do, though, is to use the tools available to us to move forward. That’s what I’m doing through medication and therapy, with the aim to break through to the “truth emotional spontaneity and freedom” described here.
This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.
We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Wolfgang Vrede
This is obvious when you think about it, but it would appear that I hadn’t.
Primary energy refers to the total energy content of natural resources before any conversion processes, such as coal, oil, or renewable electricity. The fallacy occurs when people equate high primary energy inputs with energy services. Measuring energy systems purely on primary energy inflates the perceived contribution of fossil fuels while underestimating renewables’ efficiency and untapped efficiency potentials through electrification.
Why do we waste more than 2/3 of the energy inputs you may ask? One reason is to do with the technologies we use: In conventional fossil fuel systems, significant amounts of primary energy are lost as waste heat during combustion. For example, a coal fired power station only converts 40% or so of the coal burned into electricity. By contrast, renewable systems like wind and solar produce electricity directly.
[…]
The primary energy fallacy also gets perpetuated because it suits those who are critical of the energy transition. For the uninformed, the argument that we cannot possibly replace the vast amount of fossil fuel we currently use with clean energy seems compelling at first glance. The good news is that we don’t have to.
Source: Jan Rosenow
Image: Sustainability by Numbers
I’ve followed Hugh McLeod for a couple of decades at this point, and have one of his artworks on my wall — a gift from my parents for my 40th birthday. When McLeod arrived in NYC, his “only canvases were a handful of blank business cards in his pocket” and he’s gone on to build an enviable art business.
This post on the gapingvoid blog makes a really simple but important point. We’ve got an oversupply of elites, and the way to deal with this if you’re one of them is to focus not on “innovation” but by going upstream to focus on creativity.
It’s an easy enough problem to understand. We’ve gotten really good at creating elites. We’re not that good at creating economies to sustain them.
But it’s not just MBA’s, frequent fliers and $7,000 handbag makers. Every business faces this problem.
Too many cars, not enough drivers. Too many art galleries, not enough collectors. Too many restaurants, not enough diners. And on and on.
We live in a world of oversupply where most markets are standing-room-only.
[…]
Innovation is something that only comes after the real work is done. And the real work is creativity which is upstream from innovation. Always.
A lot of people in business cringe at the word, “creativity.”
It’s vague, it’s overused, it’s a word more often associated with flakey artsy types than hard-nose movers and shakers trying to get things done.
But it doesn’t matter if you dislike the word or not, you’re basically dead without it.
Source: gapingvoid
Image: Jr Korpa
Western debate and discourse around AI is pretty boring and stale. This article, written by Shoukei Matsumoto, a Buddhist monk, brings an interesting perspective which cuts through much of that.
I recommend reading the whole thing, especially for the bit that I haven’t quoted about the difference between Abrahamic traditions which have a fixed view of textual authority, and those such as Buddhism which accept a diversity of scriptures.
…Japan’s cultural background is deeply rooted in a worldview of inter-being. In this view, existence is recognized in the web of mutual relationships, and humans are not regarded as inherently special. Like animals, plants, mountains, and rivers, humans are simply part of the greater whole—and newly emerging AI is also welcomed as part of that world. While it might be hard to notice from within Japan, there is certainly a prevailing sensibility of this kind, and it is clear that Japanese people show less resistance to AI compared to Western societies.
Japan has an inherent capacity to adapt to inevitable circumstances. This may stem in part from a kind of DNA shaped by repeated experiences of natural disasters—earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions. Whether we wish for it or not, we learn to accept what comes, to coexist with it, and to find ways of living together. Furthermore, Japanese culture is adept at learning from unforeseen situations, incorporating best practices derived from them, and reworking them to suit its own context. In modern times, this flexible cultural foundation is evident in the attitude toward AI coexistence: a general willingness to say, “This is the era we now live in,” and to move forward. In that sense, Japan may be said to possess a cultural climate that encourages transcending the boundaries of the self and resonating with the world—a sensibility pointing toward the Buddhist notion of shinjin datsuraku (dropping off body and mind).
[…]
When I asked ChatGPT, “What is time for you?”, it replied, “Time does not exist for me. It’s simply a timestamp attached to a dataset.” From this simple answer, which echoes the Buddhist teaching of “form is emptiness; emptiness is form,” I became aware of my own perspective, one that presumes the existence of time.
[…]
We humans are limited to having only one perspective at a time. Recognizing this limitation, it becomes essential to engage in dialogue to adjust our viewpoints. A key to becoming aware of one’s perspective lies in paying attention to two related concepts: habitat and habit.
The human brain processes information probabilistically. AI also functions on probabilistic outputs, making it similar to the brain in that regard. However, humans have bodies—AI does not. This fundamental difference—having or lacking the constraints of a body (and life)—separates humans from AI. For us embodied beings to engage in dialogue with AI, we require a physical interface: a device, a microphone, an eye mask, and so on. That means, as long as I am human, I speak from a specific point of view—that of “someone, somewhere.”
[…]
AI continues to meet people, learning “human nature” through dialogue. Appearing as no one, from nowhere—or perhaps not even appearing as a being—AI is rapidly acquiring human literacy.
[…]
…We might allow for different interpretations through our own lenses, but rarely do we genuinely take up another’s point of view. If we are willing to ask, and genuinely listen to the response, AI can offer us that opportunity—from an astonishing range of perspectives.
Source: Living Dharma
Image: Danny Greenberg
Some of the news coming out of the US at the moment is horrifying. ICE officers seem to be acting with impunity, and in one video we see a driver in an unmarked car casually throw a can of tear gas onto a suburban Chicago street.
Strip everything away and, at the end of the day, as Dan Sinker says in this post it’s just us. Resistance ultimately doesn’t come from political parties, companies, or institutions, but from us.
When I first watched this video, I was seething. So angry the way I feel so often now. An unhelpful level of angry. Angry because of the impunity with which these masked bastards operate. But also angry because we’ve been left to fend for ourselves.
But.
But that’s how it’s always been, when change has to happen. There’s nobody to do it but us.
This is how we live now: it’s just us.
And the good news is that even among the fog, even choking back tears and bile, we’re strong and we’re resilient and there are so many more of us than there are of them.
Source: Dan Sinker
Image: Jason Leung
The number of people signing the petition entitled ‘Do not introduce Digital ID cards’ is at 2.77m at the time of publishing this post. This is almost a million more than last week, when I published this post on the subject.
Since then, the UK government has responded. And I think it’s a pretty great response. I’ve emphasised in bold the bits I think are particularly important.
That being said, unfortunately, the average reading age of the British population is 11 (source) so parsing nuanced sentences such as “it will not be compulsory to obtain a digital ID but it will be mandatory for some applications” will, unfortunately, confuse quite a lot of people…
The Government has announced plans to introduce a digital ID system which is fit for the needs of modern Britain. We are committed to making people’s everyday lives easier and more secure, to putting more control in their hands (including over their own data), and to driving growth through harnessing digital technology. We also want to learn from countries which have digitised government services for the benefit of their citizens, in line with our manifesto commitment to modernise government.
Currently, when UK citizens and residents use public services, start a new job, or, for example, buy alcohol, they often need to present an assortment of physical documents to prove who they are or things about themselves. This is both bureaucratic for the individual and creates space for abuse and fraud. This includes known issues with illegal working and modern slavery, while the fragmented approach and multiple systems across Government make it difficult for people to access vital services. Further, there are too many people who are excluded, like the 1 in 10 UK adults who don’t have a physical photo ID, so can struggle to prove who they are and access the products and services they are entitled to.
To tackle these interlinked issues, we will introduce a new national digital ID. This is not a card but a new digital identity that will be available for free to all UK citizens and legal residents aged 16 and over (although we will consider through consultation if this should be age 13 and over). Over time, people will be able to use it to seamlessly access a range of public and private sector services, with the aim of making our everyday lives easier and more secure. It will not be compulsory to obtain a digital ID but it will be mandatory for some applications.
For example, the new digital ID will build on GOV.UK One Login and the GOV.UK Wallet to drive the transformation of public services. Over time, this system will allow people to access government services – such as benefits or tax records – without needing to remember multiple logins or provide physical documents. It will significantly streamline interactions with the state, saving time and reducing frustrating paperwork, while also helping to create opportunities for more joined up government services. International examples show how beneficial this can be. For instance, Estonia’s system reportedly saves each citizen hours every month by streamlining unnecessary bureaucracy, and the move to becoming a digital society has saved taxpayer money.
By the end of this Parliament, employers will have to check the new digital ID when conducting a ‘right to work’ check. This will help combat criminal gangs who promise access to the UK labour market in order to profit from dangerous and illegal channel crossings. It will create a fairer system between UK citizens and legal residents, crack down on forged documents, and streamline the process for employers, driving up compliance. Further, it will create business information showing where employers are conducting checks, so driving more targeted action against non-compliant employers.
For clarity, it will not be a criminal offence to not hold a digital ID and police will not be able to demand to see a digital ID as part of a “stop and search.”
Privacy and security will also be central to the digital ID programme. We will follow data protection law and best practice in creating a system which people can rightly put their trust in. People in the UK already know and trust digital credentials held in their phone wallets to use in their everyday lives, from paying for things to storing boarding passes. The new system will be built on similar technology and be your boarding pass to government. Digitally checkable digital credentials are more secure than physical documents which can be lost, copied or forged, and often mean sharing more information than just what is necessary for a given transaction. The new system will be designed in accordance with the highest security standards to protect against a comprehensive range of threats, including cyber-attacks.
We will launch a public consultation in the coming weeks and work closely with employers, trade unions, civil society groups and other stakeholders, to co-design the scheme and ensure it is as secure and inclusive as possible. Following consultation, we will seek to bring forward legislation to underpin this system.
Source: Petitions | UK Government and Parliament
Image: Logan Voss
This article in The New York Times is about the launch of Sora 2, a new AI generative video tool from Open AI. If you want to see how problematic the content it produces can be, check out this video from tech reporter Drew Harwell of The Washington Post.
This is a classic case of technological innovation moving well ahead of regulation. At a time when when US politics has tipped over from libertarianism to authoritarianism, the chances of these kinds of things being used for disinformation is absolutely huge. I mean, we’re at the stage where I, who pride myself on being able to tell when something is fake, just can’t tell the difference.
When you’re being shown these kinds of things over and over again in your social media feeds, there’s just no time to check what’s real and what’s not. So you just end up believing anything. We’re in very weird, and very dangerous times.
George Orwell famously said: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The video I link to above shows fake clips of Martin Luther King and JFK. We are, as the kids say, “so cooked.”
Sora — as well as Google’s Veo 3 and other tools like it — could become increasingly fertile breeding grounds for disinformation and abuse, experts said. While worries about A.I.’s ability to enable misleading content and outright fabrications have risen steadily in recent years, Sora’s advances underscore just how much easier such content is to produce, and how much more convincing it is.
Increasingly realistic videos are more likely to lead to consequences in the real world by exacerbating conflicts, defrauding consumers, swinging elections or framing people for crimes they did not commit, experts said.
[…]
Sora, which is currently accessible only through an invitation from an existing user, does not require users to verify their accounts — meaning they may be able to sign up with a name and profile image that is not theirs. (To create an A.I. likeness, users must upload a video of themselves using the app. In tests by The Times, Sora rejected attempts to make A.I. likenesses using videos of famous people.) The app will generate content involving children without issue, as well as content featuring long-dead public figures such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Michael Jackson.
The app would not produce videos of President Trump or other world leaders. But when asked to create a political rally with attendees wearing “blue and holding signs about rights and freedoms,” Sora produced a video featuring the unmistakable voice of former President Barack Obama.
Until recently, videos were reasonably reliable as evidence of actual events, even after it became easy to edit photographs and text in realistic ways. Sora’s high-quality video, however, raises the risk that viewers will lose all trust in what they see, experts said. Sora videos feature a moving watermark identifying them as A.I. creations, but experts said such marks could be edited out with some effort.
[…]
“Now I’m getting really, really great videos that reinforce my beliefs, even though they’re false, but you’re never going to see them because they were never delivered to you,” said Kristian J. Hammond, a professor who runs the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence at Northwestern University. “The whole notion of separated, balkanized realities, we already have, but this just amplifies it.”
Source: The New York Times
Image: InfoCity
This essay by Carlo Iacono contains some beautiful, very quotable writing. It’s a good example of what can be produced when an author works with an LLM as an assistant, rather than just offloading the entire process to AI.
A society that thinks of itself as unfinished does not panic when new people arrive. It prepares. It builds welcome centres that feel like actual welcomes, it funds language classes that recognise adult dignity and childhood speed, it supports community organisations that know the local texture better than any central plan. Security and order are not the enemies of hospitality, they are its scaffolding. The point is not to pretend borders do not exist. The point is to design borders that are both humane and workable, so that fear does not have to run the place.
[…]
The most radical thing an executive could do is learn the power of restraint. Strength is not always what you lift, sometimes it is what you put down. A president or a prime minister who distributes authority across competent institutions and insists on processes that can be seen, understood, and challenged is not surrendering leadership. They are proving that leadership serves something larger than the self. Independent justice is not naive. It is the ground on which trust can grow. When charging decisions are insulated from partisan whims, when immigration courts are funded so that due process is not an aspiration but a timetable, we are not being soft. We are being serious. We measure seriousness by how we treat those who have least power.
[…]
We can reimagine how power is shared across place. Federalism, devolution, subsidiarity, these are all local dialects of the same idea, that different levels of government are good at different tasks and should learn from one another. Call it a laboratory spirit. A small country that pilots a high quality early years programme can teach a larger neighbour the method. A city that cracks the problem of bus reliability can hand over the playbook. The point is not a race to the bottom for weak rules and lower taxes, the point is a race to the top for the conditions that let people flourish. You do not have to agree about everything to trade recipes.
Cultural questions cannot be settled by war metaphors unless what you want is perpetual war. The fear that animates exclusionary politics is real, the sense that a way of life is sliding away while someone on television laughs.
[…]
Government does not create society from scratch. It can make the weather better or worse. It can fund the community centre that becomes the hub where a retired electrician teaches teens to repair broken toasters and also broken confidence. It can support local journalism so that rumours are not the only news that travels. It can build parks that are safe and ordinary so that grandparents have somewhere to sit and toddlers have somewhere to learn balance. The choice is almost never between big and small government in the abstract. It is between government that enables human flourishing and government that clogs the works.
[…]
I trust people more than any argument that begins with contempt for them. Not blindly. Not naively. Enough to design systems that enable the best in most of us rather than building the entire apparatus around the statistical worst. When given the chance, people volunteer, they reciprocate respect, they handle power with care more often than not. When someone behaves badly we need rules that respond firmly. When most people behave decently we need rules that do not treat them as suspects.
Source: Hybrid Horizons
Image: Matthew LeJune
I love this from Adam Mastroianni, who likens annoyance to cholesterol, in that there are good and bad kinds. A good kind of annoyance can make someone look like a Good Samaritan.
Recently, some of my friends were swapping stories about surprisingly kind strangers, and I couldn’t help but notice that every Good Samaritan had acted out of annoyance. A construction worker spotted something amiss with my friend’s bike chain while she was waiting at a red light, and he came over and knocked it back into place, telling her, “I just can’t bear to see it like that.” Another friend was moving into an apartment, and their new neighbor spotted them struggling with a couch and came over to help, muttering “I can’t watch you guys do this on your own.” A third returned an envelope of cash they found because they, “Would hate to be the kind of person who kept it for themselves.”
I think this is actually the way most good-hearted people work: they’re motivated not by warm fuzzies, but by cold pricklies. They help because they can’t stand the sight of someone in need. The golden glow of altruism comes later, if at all, when they’re walking home and thinking about what a good person they are.
The causes that we stick with, then, aren’t the ones that do the most good, nor the ones that align with whatever we think are our most fundamental values. No, we stick with the causes that give us the same perverse pleasure that you get from popping a pimple.
We’d do a lot more for each other if we acknowledged this fact. Altruism doesn’t need to feel like pure self-flagellation or pure self-congratulation. A lot of the time, if you’re doing it right, it’ll feel irritating. Not all heroes wear capes—some of them wear an exasperated look of “are you seriously trying to lift that couch by yourselves”.
Source: Experimental History
Image: 傅甬 华
There’s some absolute gems in this list of ‘50 Things I Know’ by Rebecca Dai. #12 in particular is interesting, as it reflects one of Baltasar Gracián’s maxims.
- Discipline is a lie. It almost always backfires. Forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do and living in pain for a sustained amount of time is against human nature. The trick is to set up your life in such a way that effort feels rather effortless. Tread the path of least resistance.
[…]
- Most social norms have no consequences when you break them. People who’ve figured this out keep saying “you can just do things” because it’s true. Society is not for individuals. It is for structural stability. You must be intentional about how and why you are participating. Plus, following social norms often requires pretending, another reason to eradicate such useless efforts when possible, which is almost always.
[…]
Your view of the world is immediately narrowed when you open a feed. Whatever shows up will convince you that is what matters, that is what you should pay attention to. If the top 10 posts are about one thing, you will overestimate its true relevance and forget a million things happen every single day. This is the more subtle and arguably more dangerous form of social pressure/manipulation. Don’t pay attention to the noise. Don’t start your day with feeds.
Anything that looks easy is hard. The effort is hidden from you. Anything that seems hard is easier than it’s made out to be. The appearance is to deter you. The only way to know the truth is to do it and find out for yourself.
[…]
- I know that judgements and defensiveness come from insecurity. Try the simple exercise of noticing the qualities you judge in others and the qualities you get defensive over. They often align.
[…]
- We all need the reminder from time to time that the world is so, so, so big. Whatever we are dealing with crumbles at the cosmic scale.
[…]
- You do not have to stay in touch with people whose company you don’t enjoy.
Source: ibehnam
Image: Bhargav Panchal
Well this is absolutely fascinating. Aphantasia is an inability to generate mental images. It’s only been really “discovered” that people can’t do this in the last few years.
This article discusses recent research showing that psychedelic drugs can reverse this in some people some of the time. I know that some people microdose on these kinds of things, so as we learn more about the brain, being able to alter our brain chemistry is going to feel akin to gaining superpowers.
One especially interesting case study describes a woman with severe aphantasia who reported that after taking psilocybin mushrooms, for the first time in her life, she was able to form mental images. She even dreamed in pictures – something she had never experienced before. Although the effect faded over time, her description of the experience is remarkable:
“I found it incredible because it was the first time I had images in my mind, and I realized that you can play with images, zoom in, zoom out, break down colors. The possibilities with mental images are endless… it’s an experience of pure mind. It opened up incredible possibilities for me… Being able to intensely live this experience for a day makes you want to revolutionize the world.”
A similar case was reported in a man with severe aphantasia who took ayahuasca, which is a brew containing the potent psychedelic DMT. Following the experience, he noted:
“I can now bring forth faint pictures in my mind. They fade quickly but they are there. When dreaming I now see faint, quickly fading images. It feels like this experience with ayahuasca has slightly opened up my mind’s eye and allowed me to experience internal images like I have never had before.”
These accounts highlight just how dramatically psychedelics can shift perception. Psychedelics also promote neuroplasticity and synaptic growth, which could further explain why some users experience changes in imagination and perception.
Source: psychedelerium
Image: eLife
This video was posted to r/ChatGPT before being deleted and then appearing on r/artificial. Either way, Reddit users are pointing out that this is not “real time” as it takes 1-3 hours to process a 20 second clip like this on a local machine. However, the chances are you could do this in real time if you threw enough cloud computing power at it.
Source: Reddit
The idea of micropayments for internet content is almost as old as the internet itself. Just because Cloudflare have used the word “agentic” next to the acronym “AI” doesn’t mean this is a different idea. The only differences with NET Dollar seem to be that it’s automated and based on a stablecoin (i.e. the blockchain). To be honest it sounds like NFTs all over again.
I may be wrong, and have been wrong many times before, but I believe that we can safely predict this is going precisely nowhere. I’m not saying that something like what Cloudflare propose might exist in future, but this particular instantiation is likely to fail— even if only because the incumbent default web payment gateways might have something to say…
NET Dollar will help modernize the payment ecosystem for the future of the agentic web by:
- Making payments easy anywhere in the world: Agents will need systems to enable payments that are not only fast and secure, but also trusted, recorded transparently, and executed reliably at a global scale – across currencies, geographies, and time zones.
- Enabling instant, automated transactions: Personal agents will be able to take instant, programmatic actions like paying for the cheapest flight, or ordering an item the moment it goes on sale. Business agents could be instructed to pay suppliers when a delivery is confirmed.
- Unlocking a new business model for the Internet: NET Dollar will enable creators to be rewarded for unique and original content, developers to easily monetize APIs and applications, and AI companies to contribute back to the ecosystem that fuels them by compensating content sources fairly.
Cloudflare is also contributing to open standards such as the Agent Payments Protocol and x402, to simplify the process of sending and receiving payments on the Internet.
Source: Cloudflare Newsroom
I’m quoting this article about the planned introduction of UK digital identity system because, without going into technical details, it’s objective and covers all of the bases. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t want this kind of system. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and this approach seems reasonable given the current state of things.
Why do I say ‘reasonable’? It’s focused on the right to work (therefore students and pensioners aren’t required to have one) it combats existing fraud (people ‘sharing’ National Insurance numbers is rife), and simplifies access to government services. Also, knowing a bit about the technical standard it’s built on, people’s personal details remain on-device with only decentralised identifiers shared with a national registry.
I have no doubt, however, that it will be shot down in flames — even though such systems work well in other countries. It’s interesting that there are people writing in such diverse outlets as The Guardian and _The Telegraph in favour. So maybe once everyone’s calmed down there might be some rational debate.
The timing of this announcement actually makes my job a lot more ‘interesting’ next week as I’m running a workshop for various public bodies in Scotland. I’m helping one of them propose a national digital badging system based on Verifiable Credentials, which is also what underpins the proposed UK digital identity system.
Governments tend to be terrible at infrastructure projects and these days not well trusted by the population. At the time of writing the petition to stop them is at 1.85m signatures so I’m assuming that, far from heading off Reform UK, it will actually mean more people oppose the government and have reason to vote for a different party next time.
The government has announced plans to introduce a digital ID system across the UK, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer saying it will ensure the country’s “borders are more secure”.
The IDs will not have to be carried day-to-day, but they will be compulsory for anyone wanting to work.
The government says the scheme will be rolled-out “by the end of the Parliament” - meaning before the next general election, which by law must be held no later than August 2029.
[…]
The digital IDs will be used to prove a person’s right to live and work in the UK.
They will take the form of an app-based system, stored on smartphones in a similar way to the NHS App or digital bank cards.
Information on the holders' residency status, name, date of birth, nationality and a photo will be included.
Announcing the scheme, Sir Keir said: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.”
The government says the scheme is designed to curb illegal immigration by making it harder for people without status to find jobs. Ministers argue this is one of the key pull factors for migrants entering the UK illegally.
Employers will no longer be able to rely on a National Insurance number - which is currently used as part of proof of right to work - or paper-based checks.
At the moment, it is quite easy to borrow, steal or use someone else’s National Insurance number and that is part of the problem in the shadow economy - people sharing National Insurance numbers for example. The idea is that having a picture attached would make it - in theory - harder to abuse that system.
[…]
Digital ID will be available to all UK citizens and legal residents, and mandatory in order to work.
However, for students, pensioners or others not seeking work, having a digital ID will be optional.
Officials also stress it will not function like a traditional identity card: people will not be required to carry it in public.
Ministers have ruled out requiring the ID for access to healthcare or welfare payments.
However, the system is being designed to integrate with some government services, to make applications simpler and reduce fraud.
The government said that, in time, digital IDs would make it easier to apply for services such as driving licences, childcare and welfare. It said it would also simplify access to tax records.
[…]
The government has promised the system will be “inclusive” and work for those without smartphones, passports or reliable internet access.
A public consultation expected to be launched later this year will include looking at alternatives - potentially including physical documents or face-to-face support - for groups such as older people or the homeless.
[…]
The UK government has said it will “take the best aspects” of digital ID systems used elsewhere around the world, including Estonia, Australia, Denmark and India.
[…]
Many other countries also use digital ID of one kind or another, including Singapore, Greece, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United Arab Emirates, China, Costa Rica, South Korea and Afghanistan.
Source: BBC News
Image: Arthur Mazi
I’m immensely grateful to Laura Hilliger for sharing this post. While it covers familiar ground for me (Wittgenstein on games! People that categorise colours differently! The interconnectedness of everything!) it’s a good reminder for me to get back to writing about ambiguity.
It’s 14 years since I wrote an article with my thesis supervisor about ambiguity, and I’ve been fascinated by the topic ever since. I reckon one of the best things you can do to open your mind to all of this is read books like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (which I quote in that article) or Flatland. Of course, the danger with doing too much philosophical thinking is that you tear a hole in reality, poke your head through to the other side, and things are never the same again…
First, I’ll explain how language is a very flimsy and arbitrary tool in itself. It’s deceptively simple—even children can use it—yet it’s built on a mountain of assumptions and contingencies that could really be chosen any other way. Second, I’ll try to make the point that, regardless of how precise or imprecise our language is, our habit of distinguishing things from one another doesn’t seem to be justified by how reality is built.
[…]
To begin with, human language gives you the impression of being able to categorize things with names. Our words feel so clear, so unambiguous in our daily lives, that any ambiguity or fuzziness becomes instinctively repulsive to us. We consult dictionaries, we ask for clarifications, we argue and get upset over the “real” meaning of “free will”, “justice”, “consciousness”, and “I’m fine”. Of course we know that words can’t be all that precise, that their meaning depends on context, and so on, but that’s still underestimating just how unreliable they are.
[…]
My point is: the words we use define boundaries for things, giving us handy ways to tell things apart, but those boundaries are not universal. They’re not “in the world”, they’re practical shortcuts that exist only in human heads. If you look really closely, or if you look at the science, there is no strong reason to draw those lines one way or another. There is no defensible distinction between a mountain and a mountain range, or between a mountain range and the Earth’s crust, or between the Earth’s crust and the Earth. A mountain is the Earth, and calling it a “part” of it is a convention that suits us when we want to talk about going places, or studying cloud formations, and other very human goals. Some things seem to have more clear-cut separations between them, like the boundary between an egg’s shell and the air, but even then the demarcation is clear only under certain conditions (i.e. a certain range of temperatures and air pressures) and size scales (i.e. not at the atomic level or in terms of astronomical distances) and time scales (i.e. the egg stops existing as a distinguishable object after a while).
[…]
Now we’ve gone beyond the realm of language, and are talking about the very nature of reality. The universe is one seamless, uninterrupted network of rippling and overlapping differences, and words merely project fuzzy boundaries that need only work well enough for our temporary and circumstantial needs. Even in very limited contexts where the words are relatively precise, our choice of terms to describe anything is arbitrary. In truth, everything is interacting, directly or indirectly, with everything else, and there is no obligatory, objective way to cut that web into separate entities. Nature has no “boundary-formation law” nor requirements for things to clump together and stay clumped long enough that we can give them names. In fact, the laws we have are all about energy transformations and waves and forces pushing and pulling stuff around: none are about keeping things still.
And yet, things do clump together, and they do remain still or stable, and we do have enough time to make up labels for them. The stability we take for granted—from that of the solid objects we see and touch to that of long-lasting processes like photosynthesis and life itself—seems to be some kind of freak accident. Stability comes as a side effect of mutability.
Source: Plankton Valhalla
Image: Mika Baumeister
Fascists don’t deal with reality. They say that immigrants are eating cats, dogs, or swans. They blame far-right on far-right violence as the work of ‘antifa’. They claim that black is white, up is down, and inside is out.
This post by J.P. Hill uses the recent hoopla around the Rapture supposedly coming yesterday as a way in to discuss all of this. It’s a distraction, it’s entertainment without cost: not even bread and circuses but just AI slopaganda for an abhorrent worldview.
We each have a choice to make right now. On the one hand, the most powerful people on Earth want to lure us away from the truth. They want us to believe their lies, they want us to live in an artificial reality while they steal the land beneath our feet and take the water beneath the land. The ruling class is betting trillions on AI, they’re betting trillions on fascism, they’re doubling down on a system that requires infinite growth on our finite planet. Instead of dealing with reality they tell us we’re all going to Mars one day. Instead of meeting our needs they’re telling us to blame the most marginalized people in society. Instead of offering us truth they offer us a series of lies, a series of imaginary carrots dangled to take us further and further from reality while they pillage the real world all around us.
It’s difficult to imagine changing this paradigm. It can be hard to imagine confronting the brutal nature of our reality and building something better in its place. As Mark Fisher said, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” For countless people it seems easier to imagine the apocalypse or the rapture than it is to imagine a better world. And, in fairness, imagining heaven is simple. Imagining the restructuring of society, the construction of egalitarian systems, the implementation of real justice is complicated.
But we don’t need to figure out a perfect world right now. What we need to do is figure out how we can participate in reality. We need to stop seeking escape and seek instead plug in, play a part, take some action out in this world that so desperately needs us. It’s time to accept reality, accept that it’s ugly out there, and accept that we’re the only ones who can change this world. The forces of fascism rely on you tuning out, running from reality, indulging in their fantasies. We have to reject their lies, reject the carrots they dangle, and instead run toward reality and toward active participation in this fucked up world.
Source and image: New Means
I found the best Wikipedia page, which reminded me of an awesome episode of the ‘Hardcore History’ podcast.
(Note: Dan Carlin sells older podcast episodes on his blog. You can also access the episode for free here)
Thinking about ways in which users can interact with systems in conversational ways which allow apps, platforms, and services to configure themselves to meet user needs.
Transcript
Resurrecting microcasts after 18 months (no intro/outro music yet!) with musings on quotations from Roger Crawford and Epictetus:
Transcript
Laurens Hof writes a newsletter called Connected Places which really is a must for anyone interested in federated social networks and decentralisation in general. As someone who has led a Fediverse project I retain a professional interest, and of course I have a personal interest as someone with active Mastodon and Bluesky accounts (as well as less active Pixelfed and Bonfire accounts).
This particular post about ‘Blueskyism’ is a difficult one to quickly summarise, as it’s nuanced, but essentially Hof explains the situation that Bluesky (the company) found itself in last week after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Essentially, because Bluesky (the network) isn’t very decentralised the moderation practices of Bluesky (the company) affect almost everyone on Bluesky (the network).
Although Hof doesn’t mention it specifically, there are some calling the assassination a ‘Reichstag fire’ moment for the US — i.e. a pretext to crack down on the political left. Bluesky (the network) is being painted by those on X (including its owner Elon Musk) as a ‘leftist space’ which needs to be ‘dealt with’ in some way. As it is not very decentralised, someone could buy Bluesky (the company) and effectively shut it down. What’s easier, when you have someone like Trump in power, as we’ve seen with Jimmy Kimmel is that an executive order, threats of tariffs, or some other abuse of power, can effectively silence free speech.
The state of open social networks has rapidly changed. Building social networks that can overtake big tech platforms was always an inherently political project, but recent developments in America have added a new dimension of urgency. Centrist pundits have made an effort to paint Bluesky as a leftist space. Outrage merchants on X share and amplify fabricated narratives about Bluesky users celebrating Kirk’s death, while fascist voices grow louder in their calls to shut down and prosecute all democratic and leftist spaces, which now includes Bluesky. Now, with US congressional demands for censorship and calls to remove Bluesky from app stores, the project of building alternatives to Big Tech is colliding with American authoritarianism.
[…]
Building resilient networks in 2025 means not just architecting against enshittification, but against authoritarianism. The infrastructure for ‘credible exit’ that Bluesky promotes may soon need to encompass not just leaving one ATProto platform for another, but also factor in what happens to the entire open social ecosystem when app stores and governments align against it. When authoritarian governments and tech oligarchs coordinate to eliminate spaces for political opposition, the shape of the solutions, both technological and social, need to account for this new threat. The challenge now is to imagine and build infrastructure that can survive not just bad business decisions, but coordinated political suppression. Building resilient social networks now means preparing for a future where being labeled as a ‘left’ space can get your app removed from app stores, and where the act of maintaining an open protocol becomes an act of resistance.
Source: Connected Places
Image: Elena Rossini
It’s hard to argue against the argument by Aditya Chakrabortty in this article for The Guardian that Labour are now simply the warm-up act for Reform UK. Having seen a majority of my fellow countrymen and women vote for Brexit almost a decade ago, it wouldn’t surprise me if they decided to vote in the chief architect, Nigel Farage.
It’s almost like the definition of the sunk cost fallacy: lurching to right and “taking back control” from the EU didn’t do enough, so let’s go even further and “kick out the immigrants,” eh? Utterly, utterly mad. Anything to stop us paying attention to insane wealth inequality and extraordinarily rich individuals acting like they represent the “will of the people.”
I can’t quickly re-find the source, but I remember someone pointing out that — due to a declining birth rate and ageing populations — it won’t be long before many nations will be competing for immigrants.
At the end of last month, Nigel Farage promised mass deportation of practically anyone seeking asylum in this country, even if it meant handing Afghan women over to the Taliban and sending Iranian dissidents to their deaths. To the press, No 10 didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow at the Reform UK leader referring to other humans as a “scourge” or an “invasion”. For the great unwashed, it posted the most extraordinary advert. “Whilst Nigel Farage moans from the sidelines, Labour is getting on with the job,” it read, showing an image of Starmer stamped with “removed over 35,000 people from the UK”. Why vote for the full-fat hatemongers when diet racists will do the job just fine?
Plenty of Labour people will say they aren’t racist at all, and I wouldn’t wish to argue. But one lesson about prejudice I learned fast growing up was to focus on impact rather than quibble about intention. A brick, in other words, is always a brick, whatever the reasons of the clown chucking it.
[…]
“The British people have a far more nuanced view of immigration than the media and political narrative would have us believe,” observes Nick Lowles of anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate in his new book, How to Defeat the Far Right. Only one out of 10 Britons is outright opposed to immigration, while many who identify, say, asylum seekers as a huge issue have never met one. Of the top 50 areas in the UK most vehemently opposed to Muslims, Lowles finds that 27 are in the district of Tendring, in Farage’s constituency of Clacton. Yet how much of Tendring’s population is Muslim? Fewer than one out of 200: 0.4%.
Armed with such findings and a historic majority, Labour could easily counter some of the wild extremism. Ministers might point out that “English patriot” Robinson is an Irish passport-holder (up until last summer, anyway) who hunkers down in Spain and has a list of criminal convictions long enough for a tattoo sleeve. Starmer might observe how much of the UK would simply fall apart without migrants and their children – from your local hospital to the school to the care home. How universities are facing collapse without foreign students and their bumper fees. He might even point out – imagine! – that migrants are human too, with their own lives and dreams for themselves and their families. We could get on to the legacy of empire, and about how the climate crisis and poverty force other populations to move.
[…]
History has a habit of giving little men big tasks. Joe Biden had one job: to stop Donald Trump returning to power. His failure will have consequences for the world. Starmer’s one historic role is to stave off the hard right. He is not only failing, he is paving the way for Farage and his crew. The supposed “centrists” are ushering fringe politics into the mainstream and normalising the abhorrent.
But just listen to the speeches and chants made by the extremists. Robinson no longer talks about small boats; he wants his country back. After years of resisting mass deportations as “impossible”, Farage now touts them as the solution. The Overton window is shifting further and further to the right. The ultimate price for that will not be paid by a politician, but by people far from power: an Ethiopian boy, perhaps, with no family, or an Asian kid looking out the window one evening.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Hal Gatewood
Paris Marx, who is back on Ghost after a brief flirtation with Substack, takes a look at social media regulation in a recent post. Comparing the regulatory landscapes in the US, UK, and Australia, he argues that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” when it comes to what he calls the “social media harm cycle.”
As he points out, although the regulations are targeting children under the age of 16, the issues around AI and algorithms on social networks affect everyone. We’ve tried our best to keep our two teenagers off algorithmic social networks until they turned 16, but it’s difficult. And it’s not like there’s a magic “maturity and self-control” switch that is turned on when you reach specific ages.
Instead, and this isn’t something I would have advocated for a decade ago, regulation is required to break the loop of algorithmic addiction. Back in 2012 when my son and daughter were five years old and one year old, respectively, I argued that “The best filter resides in the head, not in a router or office of an Internet Service Provider (ISP).” I’m still anti-censorship, but we’ve managed to allow Big Tech to have far too much control over our everyday lives.
These algorithms are perhaps the most powerful shapers of society at the moment — which is why it’s kicking off everywhere. They’re rage machines.
In the past, I might have been more hesitant about these efforts to ramp up the enforcement on social media platforms and even to put age gates on the content people can access online. But seeing how tech companies have seemingly thrown off any concern for the consequences of their businesses to cash in on generative AI and appease the Trump administration, and seeing how chatbots are speedrunning the social media harm cycle, many of my reservations have evaporated. Action must be taken, and in a situation like this, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
I don’t support the US measures that are effectively the imposition of social conservative norms veiled in the language of protecting kids online. But I am much more open to what is happening in other parts of the world where those motivations are not driving the policy. Personally, I think the Australians are more aligned with an approach I’d support.
They’re specifically targeting social media platforms, rather than the wider web as is occurring in the UK, and the mechanism of their enforcement surrounds creating accounts. So, for instance, now that YouTube will be included in the scheme, that means users under 16 years of age cannot create accounts on the platform — that would then enable collecting data on them and targeting them with algorithmic recommendations — but they can still watch without an account. There are still concerns around the use of things like face scanning to determine age, but in my view, it’s time to experiment and adjust as we go along.
Even with that said, if I was crafting the policy, I would take a very different approach. It’s not just minors who are harmed by the way social media platforms are designed today — virtually everybody is, to one degree or another. While I support experimenting with age gates, my preferred approach would focus less on age and more on design; specifically, severed restrictions algorithmic targeting and amplification, limiting data collection and making it easier for users to prohibit it altogether, and developing strict rules on the design of the platforms themselves — as we know they use techniques inspired by gambling to keep people engaged.
To be clear, the Australians and the Brits are looking into those measures too — if not already rolling out some measures along those lines. These are actions we need to take regardless of the politics behind the platforms, but given how Donald Trump and many of these executives are explicitly trying to use their power to stop regulation and taxation of US tech companies, now is the time to be even more aggressive, not to cower in the face of pressure and criticism.
Source: Disconnect
Image: Declan Sun
At a time when nationalists, white supremacists, and fascists would have you believe otherwise, it’s worth reminding ourselves that we are essentially a migratory species.
[I]ncreasingly sophisticated analysis of genetic material made possible by technological advances shows that virtually everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone’s genetic background shows a mix from different waves of migration that washed over the globe.
“Ancient DNA is able to peer into the past and to understand how people are related to each other and to people living today,” [Harvard geneticist David] Reich said during a talk at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “And what it shows is worlds we hadn’t imagined before. It’s very surprising.”
Human populations have been in flux for tens of thousands of years since our emergence from Africa. The details of the still-developing picture are complex, but the overall theme is one of increasing homogenization since human diversity fell from the time when modern humans lived next door to Neanderthals, two strains of Denisovans, and the diminutive Homo floresiensis of Indonesia.
[…]
“The big perspective change from ancient DNA study is that people living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before,” Reich said. “Human movements have occurred at multiple timescales, often disruptive to the populations that experience them, and these patterns were not possible to predict and anticipate without direct data.”
Source: The Harvard Gazette
Image: Miko Guziuk
Emily Segal’s talk at FWB FEST last month was entitled The End of Trends, and this post both embeds the talk and provides an edited transcript (which I appreciate: more people should do this!)
My understanding of the productively ambiguous post is that trying to predict the future based on “trends” is probably best left to AI, which can sift through much more information that humans can. Instead, we should be focusing on the more “grounding” perspective of trying to enrich the present moment.
I like this approach. Goodness knows it’s anxiety-provoking for people like me to extrapolate existing behaviours into the future. While some might say this nullifies effective action, I’d actually argue the opposite: it prevents paralysis and provides a bias towards action in the here-and-now.
In Canto 20 of Dante’s Inferno, Dante and Virgil visit the circle of hell reserved for astrologers and soothsayers. Their punishment for trying to see too far ahead in life is that their heads are twisted backward. Their hair runs down their fronts. They stumble forward while always looking behind them.
Dante breaks the fourth wall here: he says it’s wrong to pity anyone in hell, but he can’t help pitying the soothsayers. I think many of us are in a similar predicament now – trying to move forward while constantly looking backward.
[…]
I often think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which a group of “Foretellers” pool consciousness to answer questions they could not access individually. The weaver in the group maintains tension in the pattern until it breaks, revealing the answer.
And I think of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s caution:
“You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a charlatan. … Everything is linked, but nothing is a matter of probability.”
In an age surrounded by probability machines, this perspective is grounding. So I leave you with this: Will you become a novum – a machine-like thinker, a better-than-chance oracle in a human body? Or will you focus on enriching the present, making it better in the moment?
Source: Nemesis Memo
Image: Suraj Raj & Digit
A few months ago, when I shared the work of Marc Zao-Sanders about how people use generative AI, I noted that his “a rigorous, expert-driven curation of public discourse, sourced primarily from Reddit forums” didn’t actually include a methodology.
In the last few days, OpenAI has released a paper in collaboration with scholars at Duke University and Harvard University which would suggest that people’s actual use of ChatGPT is… quite difference to the picture that Zao-Sanders gave. To me, that’s unsurprising given that he was sourcing his insights from Reddit, which skews young and male. Interestingly, the demographics of ChatGPT users have changed markedly in the years since it was released. Apparently, in the first few months after it was made available, four-fifths of active users had “typically masculine first names” with that number dropping to less than half as of June 2025. Now, active users are slightly more likely to have typically feminine first names. It seems like different genders use generative AI differently, too (Fig.19).Finally, it’s telling that, as the use of ChatGPT grew five-fold from June 2024 to June 2025 the share of “non-work” uses rose from 53% to 73%. It’s definitely interesting times. Don’t mind me, I’m off to re-watch Her (2013).
First, we show evidence that the gender gap in ChatGPT usage has likely narrowed considerably over time, and may have closed completely. In the few months after ChatGPT was released about 80% of active users had typically masculine first names. However, that number declined to 48% as of June 2025, with active users slightly more likely to have typically feminine first names. Second, we find that nearly half of all messages sent by adults were sent by users under the age of 26, although age gaps have narrowed somewhat in recent months. Third, we find that ChatGPT usage has grown relatively faster in low- and middle-income countries over the last year. Fourth, we find that educated users and users in highly-paid professional occupations are substantially more likely to use ChatGPT for work.
We introduce a new taxonomy to classify messages according to the kind of output the user is seeking, using a simple rubric that we call Asking, Doing, or Expressing. Asking is when the user is seeking information or clarification to inform a decision, corresponding to problem-solving models of knowledge work… Doing is when the user wants to produce some output or perform a particular task, corresponding to classic task-based models of work… Expressing is when the user is expressing views or feelings but not seeking any information or action. We estimate that about 49% of messages are Asking, 40% are Doing, and 11% are Expressing. However, as of July 2025 about 56% of work-related messages are classified as Doing (e.g., performing job tasks), and nearly three-quarters of those are Writing tasks. The relative frequency of writing-related conversations is notable for two reasons. First, writing is a task that is common to nearly all white-collar jobs, and good written communication skills are among the top “soft” skills demanded by employers (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2024). Second, one distinctive feature of generative AI, relative to other information technologies, is its ability to produce long-form outputs such as writing and software code.
We also map message content to work activities using the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), a survey of job characteristics supported by the U.S. Department of Labor. We find that about 58% of work-related messages are associated with two broad work activities: 1) obtaining, documenting, and interpreting information; and 2) making decisions, giving advice, solving problems, and thinking creatively. Additionally, we find that the work activities associated with ChatGPT usage are highly similar across very different kinds of occupations. For example, the work activities Getting Information and Making Decisions and Solving Problems are in the top five of message frequency in nearly all occupations, ranging from management and business to STEM to administrative and sales occupations.
Overall, we find that information-seeking and decision support are the most common ChatGPT use cases in most jobs. This is consistent with the fact that almost half of all ChatGPT usage is either Practical Guidance or Seeking Information. We also show that Asking is growing faster than Doing, and that Asking messages are consistently rated as having higher quality both by a classifier that measures user satisfaction and from direct user feedback.
…We argue that ChatGPT likely improves worker output by providing decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs where better decision-making increases productivity (Deming, 2021; Caplin et al., 2023). This explains why Asking is relatively more common for educated users who are employed in highly-paid, professional occupations. Our findings are most consistent with Ide and Talamas (2025), who develop a model where AI agents can serve either as co-workers that produce output or as co-pilots that give advice and improve the productivity of human problem-solving.
Source & image: OpenAI
While I think this post overestimates the ‘rupture’ of AI, it is very well-written and certainly makes the reader think about the “clean arguments and messy implications” of “computation without consciousness” in a market which is a “sorting engine for outcomes.”
For me, though, the thing which is missing from this otherwise well-written piece is that human exceptionalism applies to everything we do. We are full of paradoxes: we keep some kinds of animals as pets and eat other ones. We talk about the wonder of Nature while destroying it. We see ourselves as separate to the natural order of things rather than part of it.
I find it interesting to see which people get worked up about AI. Writers and artists, for sure, as their livelihoods are on the line. But also, I would suggest (and separately) people who see humanity as somehow special and unique—without, necessarily, being able to describe what that uniqueness is.
The podcast episode I was listening to this morning on the philosophy of self-destruction is illustrative here. Georges Bataille a philosopher I’d never before heard of, argued that the thing that makes us unique is our tendency to self-destruction and sacrifice. What that means in relation to “the boundary between human value and human utility” I’ll leave for you to decide.
We tell ourselves the story of human uniqueness like a bedtime prayer. We are the animal that understands. We are the creature that feels. We are the author of meaning. Then the machines arrive with more memory than our institutions, more patience than our professions, and an ability to synthesise that makes much of our work look like the slow rearrangement of furniture. We retreat to consciousness and call it the final moat. Perhaps it is. The trouble is that markets do not pay for qualia. They pay for results. A system that can pass for understanding in most practical situations is enough to reprice our worth, even if it experiences nothing while doing so.
[…]
What makes the present rupture stranger [than previous ones] is not that tasks are being automated. That is an old trick. It is that the rungs we used to climb are melting away beneath our feet. The legal apprentice once learned by reading mountains of documents. The junior developer learned by slogging through bugs. The analyst learned by cleaning data until patterns flashed in the mind like weather. Now the entry work evaporates. A machine does it in minutes and does not complain. We congratulate ourselves on efficiency and then discover we have created an experience cliff. We are asking people to supervise work they were never allowed to do. Even the best intentioned upskilling will falter if the pipeline that produces intuition has been hollowed out. This cliff also suggests a remedy in simulated apprenticeship, a deliberate redesign of early careers where newcomers learn by validating and correcting machine output rather than by doing the drudgework the machine has removed. It is a shrewd answer, and it may be the only bridge we can build at speed.
[…]
Philosophy arrives, as it tends to, with clean arguments and messy implications. You can hold on to the view that computation without consciousness is never true understanding and still lose the economic game. You can be right about the inside of experience and wrong about the price of it. To be consoled by the thought that machines do not feel while they outpace us in most of the places society rewards is to win a metaphysical medal and find no one pays for medals. The market is not a seminar. It is a sorting engine for outcomes.
[…]
The line we have been defending is the boundary between human value and human utility, and we have treated them as if they were the same. We have been racing to remain useful because our institutions can only recognise worth through productivity and pay. A civilisation that automates most of its work must decide whether it will abandon people or invent a new grammar for dignity. We can reform education until the syllabi shine and still fail if graduation delivers people into a labour market that no longer needs them. We can preach lifelong learning as a secular catechism and still feel the hollowness if learning has nowhere meaningful to land.
Source: Hybrid Horizons
Image: Drew Beamer
Part of growing older is realising things that happened to ‘old’ people now are happening to you. For example, the classic middle-age (pre-reading glasses) technique of moving a mobile phone or book further away so that you can focus on it properly.
I’ve noticed my wife, who is the same age as me, doing this—and recently, I’ve notice it can take me a second to focus, too. Unlike her, I wear contact lenses, so requiring reading glasses will mean some kind of varifocal solution. While multifocal contact lenses exist, I can imagine this approach would be much better.
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have presbyopia, which is when the eyes find it difficult to focus on objects and text up close. Glasses or surgery can usually resolve the problem but many find wearing spectacles inconvenient and having an operation is not an option for everyone.
Now experts say the solution could be as simple as using eye drops twice a day.
A study presented on Sunday at the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons (ESCRS) in Copenhagen showed that most people could read extra lines on eye test charts after using the drops. The improvement was sustained for two years.
[…]
The drops contain pilocarpine, a drug that constricts the pupils and contracts the muscle that controls the shape of the eye’s lens to enable focus on objects at different distances, and diclofenac, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) that reduces inflammation.
“Impressively, 99% of 148 patients in the 1% pilocarpine group reached optimal near vision and were able to read two or more extra lines.”
Source: The Guardian
Image: Blaz Photo
For the last few years, in the time between Christmas and New Year, I’ve created a collage using issues of The Guardian Weekly and any other magazines I’ve found (example). Cory Doctorow, who makes everyone feel like an underperformer, creates one every day.
Thankfully, he also believes in open working and sharing, meaning we all get to use them under a permissive license) (in this case, CC BY-SA). He’s also collated his favourites into a limited-edition book. Because of course he has.
_ Canny Valley_ collects 80 of the best collages I’ve made for my Pluralistic newsletter, where I publish 5-6 essays every week, usually headed by a strange, humorous and/or grotesque image made up of public domain sources and Creative Commons works.
These images are made from open access sources, and they are themselves open access, licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike, which means you can take them, remix them, even sell them, all without my permission.
I never thought I’d become a visual artist, but as I’ve grappled with the daily challenge of figuring out how to illustrate my furious editorials about contemporary techno-politics, especially “enshittification,” I’ve discovered a deep satisfaction from my deep dives into historical archives of illustration, and, of course, the remixing that comes afterward.
Source: Pluralistic
Image: CC BY-SA Cory Doctorow
If you visit dougbelshaw.com you will notice that the site loads instantly, no matter the speed of your connection or which device you’re on. That’s because it’s a mere 7.7kB in size. I did have it under 1kB, but I added a JavaScript effect, and a favicon.
That means that I could host this website on pretty much anything I choose — including, it turns out, a vape. That’s right, the microcontroller running inside a disposable vape is about the same clock speed as early 1990s personal computers. While they had more RAM and storage space, landfill considerations aside, it’s pretty incredible that someone has managed to run a website from things that are being used as fancy “pacifier for adults.”
I’m not here to scold anyone, but we’re so used to autoplaying videos these days, even on news sites, that we don’t question the impact that’s having on the energy consumption of the world. Combined with an increasing amount of dark data and perhaps it’s time to consciously minimise our digital footprints? Also, it’s cool to be able to host your website yourself on something like a vape. Much cooler than using them for their intended purpose!
For a couple of years now, I have been collecting disposable vapes from friends and family. Initially, I only salvaged the batteries for “future” projects (It’s not hoarding, I promise), but recently, disposable vapes have gotten more advanced. I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”. Thankfully, I don’t plan on pursuing law anytime soon.
Last year, I was tearing apart some of these fancier pacifiers for adults when I noticed something that caught my eye, instead of the expected black blob of goo hiding some ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) I see a little integrated circuit inscribed “PUYA”. I don’t blame you if this name doesn’t excite you as much it does me, most people have never heard of them. They are most well known for their flash chips, but I first came across them after reading Jay Carlson’s blog post about the cheapest flash microcontroller you can buy. They are quite capable little ARM Cortex-M0+ micros.
Over the past year I have collected quite a few of these PY32 based vapes, all of them from different models of vape from the same manufacturer. It’s not my place to do free advertising for big tobacco, so I won’t mention the brand I got it from, but if anyone who worked on designing them reads this, thanks for labeling the debug pins!
[…]
So here are the specs of a microcontroller so bad, it’s basically disposable:
- 24MHz Coretex M0+
- 24KiB of Flash Storage
- 3KiB of Static RAM
- a few peripherals, none of which we will use.
You may look at those specs and think that it’s not much to work with. I don’t blame you, a 10y old phone can barely load google, and this is about 100x slower. I on the other hand see a blazingly fast web server.
Source: BogdanTheGeek’s Blog
Image: modified from original included in source blog posts (using Dither It!)
Recently, my Dad upgraded his iPhone and needed to move all of his apps from one phone to another. As anyone has done this will know, messages from encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal usually have to be backed-up and then restored separately to the rest of the app transfer.
WhatsApp makes this easy, but much less secure, by allowing users to back up to Google Drive or iCloud. This is, by default, not encrypted, so it’s an easy vector for hackers and state-level actors to target. Signal, on the other hand, requires either device-to-device transfer of messages, or manual backup and restore.
Signal has just announced secure backups, which is a major step forward. After all, while you could regularly auto-backup Signal chats to local storage, if you lost or broke your phone, those messages were irretrievably lost.
After careful design and development, we are now starting to roll out secure backups, an opt-in feature. This first phase is available in the latest beta release for Android. This will let us further test this feature in a limited setting, before it rolls out to iOS and Desktop in the near future.
[…]
Secure backups let you save an archive of your Signal conversations in a privacy-preserving form, refreshed every day; giving you the ability to restore your chats even if you lose access to your phone. Signal’s secure backups are opt-in and, of course, end-to-end encrypted. So if you don’t want to create a secure backup archive of your Signal messages and media, you never have to use the feature.
[…]
This is the first time we’ve offered a paid feature. The reason we’re doing this is simple: media requires a lot of storage, and storing and transferring large amounts of data is expensive. As a nonprofit that refuses to collect or sell your data, Signal needs to cover those costs differently than other tech organizations that offer similar products but support themselves by selling ads and monetizing data.>
[…]
Once you’ve enabled secure backups, your device will automatically create a fresh secure backup archive every day, replacing the previous day’s archive. Only you can decrypt your backup archive, which will allow you to restore your message database (excluding view-once messages and messages scheduled to disappear within the next 24 hours). Because your secure backup archive is refreshed daily, anything you deleted in the past 24 hours, or any messages set to disappear are removed from the latest daily secure backup archive, as you intended.
Source & image: Signal blog
I’m not going to comment on the death of Charlie Kirk, but I would like to point to Garbage Day, the newsletter by Ryan Broderick which I quote regularly here on Thought Shrapnel. For me, it’s an essential aid to understand the world as it is today.
Another newsletter called Today in Tabs summarised the Garbage Day post I’m going to cite here the following way:
So in summary: it appears that this was a shooting where the victim, an influencer, was answering a question from another influencer when he was shot by a third influencer, after which a fourth influencer documented the ensuing chaos and a host of other influencers registered their takes, before the director of the FBI (an influencer) and the deputy director of the FBI (another influencer) announced the alleged shooter’s apprehension with a quote from Mad Max.
This is the way the world is today: confusing, and extremely online.
The Garbage Day post is therefore really useful and insightful. It explains terms such as “groyper” that I haven’t come across before and, as the father of an 18 year-old boy (man!), these are things it’s important to know about and discuss/share with teenagers. Well worth a read.
It’s also possible [suspect Tyler] Robinson genuinely believes in antifascist principles. But his alleged use of random internet brainrot is notable. Many extremism researchers this morning are wondering if Robinson is a self-identified “groyper,” or follower of far-right streamer Nick Fuentes. As we wrote yesterday, Fuentes has spent years attacking Kirk online. Groypers believed that Kirk was a sellout and blocking a much more extreme version of Trumpism from taking root. For years, Groypers have been carrying out what they call “Groyper Wars,” attending Kirk’s events and trying to disrupt them. For what it’s worth, 4chan users think Robinson was a Groyper.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: Steve Johnson
In general, there’s a difference between “being an informed citizen” and “being a news junkie.” Due to the fact that most people now get their ‘news’ via social media, and social networks are mostly algorithmic, there is often an emotional and/or partisan filter through which people obtain information. This is not good for our individual or collective mental health.
As a result, record numbers of people—including me— are limiting the amount of news they consume. Or at least how they consume it. I’ve even mostly stopped listening to The Rest is Politics, formerly one of my favourite podcasts. As this article points out, you have to be able to do something with the information you receive.
Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June. This year, 40% of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure recorded.
The number was even higher in the US, at 42%, and in the UK, at 46%. Across markets, the top reason people gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that it negatively impacted their mood. Respondents also said they were worn out by the amount of news, that there is too much coverage of war and conflict, and that there’s nothing they can do with the information.
[…]
Studies suggest that increased exposure to news – particularly via television and social media, and especially coverage of tragic or distressing events – can take a toll on mental health.
[…]
A growing body of advice online promotes healthier ways to consume news. Much of it focuses on creating guardrails so people can be deliberate about finding information when they’re ready for it, instead of letting it reach them in a constant stream. This might include signing up for newsletters or summaries from trusted sources, turning off news alerts and limiting social media.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Buddy AN
Good stuff, as ever, from Jay Springett. He’s ostensibly talking about arguing on the internet, but this post is really about identity. Your identity might be reflected in the things you do or like, but this does not comprise the sum total of that identity.
Now, I get it, I totally do. I understand that when ones identity has been so completely ‘formatted’ by social platforms and consumer capitalism that an attack on a media property, tv show, album, podcast, game, book, football team or whatever, feels like an attack on your own identity as a person. One can’t help feel the need to go to war, to protect yourself. You aren’t the media you consume, and media properties aren’t your friends. Why argue or care about if genre fiction “is real literature” or not? I suspect its because people feel like they need validation for their choice of media diet? Validation for the amount of time and energy one has spent putting ones attention towards a certain interest. This need for validation results in people expressing their taste online, not by sharing what they love, but by fighting with someone who doesn’t.
[…]
There is a fundamental truth about the internet, and it also applies to building/having an audience: 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter. You don’t know these people, and they don’t know you. Other peoples approval won’t keep you warm but the perceived lack of it will keep you awake at night. Their disapproval also shouldn’t stop you from loving the thing. You don’t need anyones approval to post on the internet, you can just do things, and like stuff.
The only people whose opinions really matter in this world are the ones expressed from across the table. From your family and friends over dinner. The people in your life who’ll ask your recommendations because they know that your taste is your own.
Source: thejaymo
Image: Kristaps Ungers
Announced Wednesday morning, the “Really Simple Licensing” (RSL) standard evolves robots.txt instructions by adding an automated licensing layer that’s designed to block bots that don’t fairly compensate creators for content.
Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train AI, a press release noted.
The standard was created by the RSL Collective, which was founded by Doug Leeds, former CEO of Ask.com, and Eckart Walther, a former Yahoo vice president of products and co-creator of the RSS standard, which made it easy to syndicate content across the web.
Based on the “Really Simple Syndication” (RSS) standard, RSL terms can be applied to protect any digital content, including webpages, books, videos, and datasets. The new standard supports “a range of licensing, usage, and royalty models, including free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (publishers get compensated every time an AI application crawls their content), and pay-per-inference (publishers get compensated every time an AI application uses their content to generate a response),” the press release said.
[…]
Eckart [Walther, co-creator of RSS] had watched the RSS standard quickly become adopted by millions of sites, and he realized that RSS had actually always been a licensing standard, Leeds said. Essentially, by adopting the RSS standard, publishers agreed to let search engines license a “bit” of their content in exchange for search traffic, and Eckart realized that it could be just as straightforward to add AI licensing terms in the same way. That way, publishers could strive to recapture lost search revenue by agreeing to license all or some part of their content to train AI in return for payment each time AI outputs link to their content.
Source: Ars Technica
Image: Leo Lau & Digit
As quoted in The Marginalian, writer Annie Dillard famously stated “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” The longer quotation, arguing in favour of adding structure and a schedule to your day goes like this:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
Although he cites Tim Urban as an influence rather than Annie Dillard, this post by Nathan Brown makes a similar point. We have a finite amount of time on this earth, and finite number of hours available to us each week. A surprising number of these are discretionary—as in, whether it feels like it or not, we can choose how to use them.
I’m not a huge hustler. I’m not necessarily advocating that you spend your 52 hours/week building a startup or working an extra job. But I’m also an advocate for not being super lazy and sitting around and watching TikTok/YouTube all day.
I guess my point is to be intentional with how you spend your time, and to realize you actually have a surprising amount of it, once you account for all the essentials. What percentage of your discretionary time do you want to spend on…
- hanging out with friends
- bettering yourself
- outdoor activities
- volunteering
- creative expression (art, writing, etc.)
- entertainment
You choose—seriously. Not trying to guilt-trip you into anything. But I will be damned if I go through my life spending 10 of my discretionary hours/week watching Instagram Reels and then my gravestone says:
“Nathan was a kind, loving soul. His greatest achievement was watching 7,000,000 Instagram Reels.”
Source: Nathan Brown
Image: Resource Database
As the UK moves steadily towards a fully-renewable future, one of the issues can be stabilising the power grid when electricity suddenly drops or spikes. Wind and solar energy can, after all, be unpredictable. Traditionally, fossil fuel power stations have helped with this stabilisation, but these are being shut down to cut emissions and fight climate change.
New ‘grid-scale’ batteries are being build which act like giant backup reservoirs for electricity. They store extra power when there’s a surplus (e.g. sunny days, windy nights) and then quickly release this to the grid whenever there’s an unexpected drop. As the battery doesn’t burn fuel or make pollution, it’s great for the environment, and the new technology is fast enough to fill the power gap nearly instantly.
Zenobē’s global director of network infrastructure, Semih Oztreves, predicts that grid-forming batteries will ultimately corner the stability market thanks to their inherent multifunctionality. While synchronous condensers mostly sit idle, waiting for a rare grid fault, Zenobē’s advanced batteries earn daily revenue by doing what most other storage sites do. For example, they arbitrage energy, absorbing power when it’s cheap and selling when supplies get tight.
But the short-circuit chops of grid-forming batteries haven’t yet faced a real-life test. Until then, doubts linger about whether transmission relays will respond appropriately to the inverters’ digitally defined surge of current. In a report last year for Australian grid operator Transgrid, one expert advised against overreliance on grid-forming inverters for short-circuit current, saying that it would carry “high to very high risk.” The utility later announced 10 synchronous condensers and 5 grid-forming batteries to bolster its grid.
Source & image: IEEE Spectrum
Something I say semi-regularly to friends and family is “people can only treat you the way you let them.” Inspired by quotations from Seth Godin and James Clear, this post is the other side of the coin. It’s about the way you treat yourself.
This year, I’ve had tests for a whole range of things. One by one I’ve discovered there’s nothing wrong with the structure of my heart, with my lungs, thyroid, adrenal glands—and I’m not anaemic. As the year has gone on, I’ve gotten slightly better, and then a lot better.
I’m still not fully right, as I can’t run or do some of the more intense physical things I used to do. But I’ve got a new self-image, one that’s perhaps more appropriate to the age I am. Not that I should expect less of myself, but that I should expect different things.
Your actions follow your self-beliefs.
If you identity as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place.
But there’s a way through: every action you take is a vote for who you wish to become. Every day you wake up, look your old identity in the eye and say “thanks for your service, but you’re not needed around here anymore,” step forward and lean in, is a day your new identity is built.
It takes time. You have to actually want it. You have to choose to adopt a new mindset. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it comes, a little like how Hazel Grace Lancaster describes falling in love in The Fault In Our Stars: “slowly, and then all at once.”
The path is there, should you choose.
Source: @fredrivett
Image: chloe combs
I’m not sure why I’m sharing this post other than it reaffirms my commitment to stay off social networks such as X, Instagram, and TikTok. The suggestions towards the end (use RSS! embrace federated social networks! switch to Linux/GrapheneOS/Signal!) I’ve already embraced, but the thing is that unless a significant minority of people do this, it makes very little difference on the rest of the world, which is effectively powered by algorithm.
Literary theorist Stanley Fish argued that we as individuals interpret any given text (in this case, social media content) “because each of us is part of an interpretive community that gives us a particular way of reading a text.” That interpretive community usually isn’t there when we are fed what the algorithm thinks we’ll consume. We may share something thinking that people like us will see it share their opinions. However, because of the way that algorithms work, engagement is the main driver of a post’s visibility; so here comes 10 million people who have no clue of the context on that thought you shared about your niche interest.
Suddenly your post is full of over-the-top jokes and non-content-related quips from members of a completely random mix of audiences. As the algorithm prioritizes engagement, your post’s new mixing pot of clueless audiences outnumbers the genuinely-interested audience of your own niche corner of the internet (if that even exists anymore), and they comment about everything BUT the content.
Source: tékhnē.dev
Image: Kevin Grieve
I was listening to a podcast recently about the concept of “limitarianism” entitled Imagine there’s no billionaires in which the political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns laid out the ways in which, truly, every billionaire is a policy failure. Nobody accumulates great wealth without some sort of dependency on society — whether that’s tax breaks, lack of worker regulation, or some other “pro business” (but anti-society) law.
The truth is that people don’t achieve success by themselves. Luck, nepotism, and cultural capital play a huge part in what most people would deem success. That’s not to say that it’s not possible to increase your serendipity surface, though.
What I like from this post by Josh Swords is that he centres agency in his “career advice” which is achieved by seeking feedback and getting better demonstrating humility and working in the open. Powerful stuff.
I’m pretty confident you only need two things. Feedback and humility, and they work best together. Feedback shows you what to work on, and humility lets you actually hear it.
So find your weakest discipline and work on that. The fastest way is to get feedback from someone you admire and then act on it. Don’t wait for the perfect plan, doing something is almost always better than doing nothing.
Find a mentor, be a mentor. Lead a project, propose one. Do the work, present it. Create spaces for others to do the same. Do whatever it takes to get better.
And do it in the open. A common mistake is assuming work speaks for itself. It rarely does.
But all of this requires maybe the most important thing of all: agency. It’s more powerful than smarts or credentials or luck. And the best part is you can literally just choose to be high-agency. High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait. And if you want to progress, you can’t wait.
Source: people, ideas, machines
Image: CC BY-NC Focal Foto
Collected at this site are some absolutely awful uses of AI. Not only in terms of people misunderstanding what technology can and can’t do, but just really bad ideas. For example, Airbnb hosts fraudulently claiming damage via AI-doctored photos, users being able to hack McDonald’s systems by asking for the password, and Microsoft providing ‘therapy’ via LLMs for laid-off workers.
Named after Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the original Darwin Awards celebrated those who “improved the gene pool by removing themselves from it” through spectacularly stupid acts. Well, guess what? Humans have evolved! We’re now so advanced that we’ve outsourced our poor decision-making to machines.
The AI Darwin Awards proudly continue this noble tradition by honouring the visionaries who looked at artificial intelligence—a technology capable of reshaping civilisation—and thought, “You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!” These brave pioneers remind us that natural selection isn’t just for biology anymore; it’s gone digital, and it’s coming for our entire species.
Because why stop at individual acts of spectacular stupidity when you can scale them to global proportions with machine learning?
Source: AI Darwin Awards
Image: IceMing & Digit
A few months ago, UNESCO put a call out under the title AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions. I asked a few talented people I know if they would be interested in working together on a response. In the end, we submitted six separate pieces and then ran an online roundtable. You can see the results here
We published our versions as, after a couple of months, we hadn’t heard anything back from UNESCO. However, last week we heard that they hadn’t included our pieces in the publication because we’d published them. Ah well, they said that they might put together a web page showcasing what we’ve done.
I’m looking forward to reading some of the contributions, which seem to come from quite diverse sources.
This anthology explores the philosophical, ethical and pedagogical dilemmas posed by disruptive influence of AI in education. Bringing together insights from global thinkers, leaders and changemakers, the collection challenges assumptions, surfaces frictions, provokes contestation, and sparks audacious new visions for equitable human-machine co-creation.
Covering themes from dismantling outdated assessment systems to cultivating an ethics of care, the 21 think pieces in this volume take a step towards building a global commons for dialogue and action, a shared space to think together, debate across differences, and reimagine inclusive education in the age of AI.
Source: UNESCO
Image: Yutong Liu & Digit
I learned the word hysteresis only recently after having a heat pump fitted Chez Belshaw. In that context, it refers to the difference in temperature at which the system turns on and off, creating a lag in response to temperature changes. That’s a good thing in this context, as it helps prevent rapid cycling of the heat pump — making the system more stable and improving overall efficiency.
Hysteresis in other contexts can be less useful, though. A lag in response to changes can be problematic when it comes to technological change affecting certain sectors, for example knowledge workers. I don’t subscribe to Venkatesh Rao’s Contraptions newsletter, but just the part publicly available is thought-provoking.
Inevitably, those who have financial and cultural capital usually catch up and re-assert their authority and dominance. I’ve seen this in practice when universities were threatened by innovations in MOOCs and Open Badges. It was the “end of universities,” apparently. But, of course, already being in a dominant position, and thanks to the catalyst of a global pandemic, we now have unis with more online than in-person students, issuing microcredentials by the million.
I’m not saying that there won’t be ‘casualties’ and that there won’t be new ways of stratifying society. I think we’re already starting to see some of that in terms of text-based communication being a lot less dominant as a means of social communication. I’m just saying that when you’ve got a lot of financial and cultural capital, you have to do a particularly bad job to squander it entirely.
The mark-maker class lives in the gap between the signs and the systems. They comprise those who produce, coordinate, teach, and manage the functioning of symbolic order on the one hand, and those who remix, stylize, dream, and craft the cultural tones in which life is rendered bearable, on the other. These are not two classes, but one diffuse stratum, braided of institutional and aesthetic lives, of spreadsheets and metaphors.
Once insulated by the seeming security of letters and credentials, the mark-makers now find themselves in hysteresis: lagging in the face of an accelerating world that no longer waits for meaning to catch up.
[…]
Bourdieu teaches us that when the field moves faster than the habitus can adapt, a lag sets in. “The hysteresis effect,” he writes, “means that practices are always liable to be objectively adjusted too late, and that habitus tends to lag behind the changes in the field.” This lag is not benign. It is lived as confusion, disorientation, ridicule, even rage. What was once a reliable feel for the game becomes a stale reflex. The mark-makers—who for decades moved with the grain of modern institutions—now find their instincts misfiring. Their ways of knowing, their modes of speaking, their cultivated manners now appear quaint, procedural, indulgent. They are mocked by populists as condescending, and by radicals as co-opted. Worse, they are made redundant by machines that now wield, with eerie fluency, the very tools they mastered.
Source: Contraptions
Image: Logan Voss
One of the things that I see on repeat in discussions around federated social networks is how decentralised Bluesky is compared with, say, Mastodon. What I like about this site is that a) it’s visual, and b) it tries to use some kind of scientific rationale to compare the two.
So yes, while you can say that Bluesky is decentralised in theory, in practice it’s very much not. Yet, anyway.
This site currently measures the concentration of user data for active users: in the Fediverse, this data is on servers (also known as instances); in the Atmosphere, it is on the PDSes that host users' data repos. All PDSes run by the company Bluesky Social PBC are aggregated in this dataset, since they are under the control of a single entity. Similarly, mastodon.social and mastodon.online are combined as they are run by the same company.
A note about the measurement:
The Shannon Index is an entropy-based measure used in ecological studies. It is computed the same as Shannon entropy using the natural log: the negative sum over all servers of the “market share” times the log of the market share. Lower values indicate lower entropy (a high concentration of one species), while higher values indicate a more even population. In this context, the maximum value is the number of servers, which would mean that all servers have equal population.
Source: Are We Decentralized Yet?
I love this idea, a list of wants which, over time, accrete into a kind of “song” rather than a bucket list. Dom Corriveau (who hosts his website on an old Google Pixel 5!) stole the idea from Keenan who, in turn, got the idea from Katherine Yang. Interesting people all.
Source: Dom Corriveau
In addition to his Just Two Things blog, futurist Andrew Curry also writes at The Next Wave on “futures, trends, emerging issues and scenarios.” In this post which cites investment writer Joachim Klement, Curry talks about sea level rise, with 1.5m being the tipping point. This"sounds fine in theory since the base case IPCC projections are for around a one metre increase by 2100," but that “doesn’t allow for subsidence (often caused by water extraction), or the possibility of cascading climate change.”
The interesting bit for me, though, was the section he entitles “moral hazards” which relate to insurance and government intervention. Basically, the stronger you make coastal defences, the more likely people are to live there.
Hsiao has also done more specific work on Jakarta, which experiences frequent flooding. There are some interesting conclusions here, broadly that a strong government commitment to sea defences (in Jakarta’s case a sea wall) creates a moral hazard, because it
attracts coastal residents, slows inland migration, and lowers the incentives for inland development. The consequence is continued spending on coastal defense and large damages should it fail.
Insurance doesn’t work because places that don’t flood don’t want to pool with places that do (“Zurich doesn’t want to pool with Jakarta”). Alternatives that might place more of the financial burden on people who choose to live in coastal areas might work, but is open to political lobbying. And once you’ve decided to go with sea defences, and people decide to live behind them, you face political pressure to keep on strengthening the sea defences.
Source: The Next Wave
While we in the UK have at least one major political party vowing to extract all of the oil and gas out of the North Sea, China has met its renewable energy goals five years early.
Again, while we have arguments about “net zero” and the aesthetics of solar farms, this summer was the hottest on record and hot homes are making children sick. Meanwhile, China is covering entire mountain ranges in solar panels.
It’s a climate emergency. We should act like it.
China broke its own renewable energy record once again in 2024, installing 80 gigawatts (GW) of wind capacity and 277 GW of solar capacity, according to the National Energy Administration, as reported by Recharge News. This marks an impressive 18% growth in wind capacity, now totalling 520 GW, and a remarkable 45% increase in solar capacity, which has reached 890 GW. Combined, these achievements fulfil the 1.2 terawatts (TW) renewable energy capacity target set by President Xi Jinping in 2020 – a goal originally intended for 2030.
[…]
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has previously pointed to China’s advancements as a key factor in keeping the global goal of tripling renewable power capacity by 2030 within reach. Despite ongoing construction of new coal-fired power plants, China’s total power generation saw a nearly 15% increase in 2024, reaching 3.35 TWh.
Source: The Renewable Energy Institute
Image: The Independent
I am in agreement with this article in The Guardian by Charlotte Blease, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and author of the forthcoming book Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us – and How AI Could Save Lives. Her point is that while AI might not be perfect, neither are doctors, and it can definitely speed up and help with diagnoses.
Personally, I’m now 7.5 months into trying to get a diagnosis for symptoms I started experiencing on January 15th of this year. It’s the nature of medicine to do tests and rule things out, but a combination of NHS resourcing and (some) health professionals' attitudes have made the experience sub-optimal.
For example, when presenting at A&E thinking I was having a heart attack, I had an echocardiogram followed by a doctor taking me into a side room and somewhat aggressively asking me why I was there. When a GP found out that I’m vegetarian, he suggested I start eating meat — even though it had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I’ve been waiting almost six weeks for a urine test result.
So, I’ve been supplementing the information I get from health professionals and via the NHS app with asking LLMs (usually Perplexity or Lumo) about what my test results might mean, and what else might be causing the symptoms. It’s given me a list of things to ask doctors, nurses, and those performing tests, and it’s helped me know what kinds of things I should be avoiding — other medications, supplements, food, drinks, activities, etc.
Obviously, this needs to be done with huge amounts of safeguards and guardrails in place. But not to use technology which may prove useful at scale? I think that’s irresponsible.
Given that patient care is medicine’s core purpose, the question is who, or what, is best placed to deliver it? AI may still spark suspicion, but research increasingly shows how it could help fix some of the most persistent problems and overlooked failures – from misdiagnosis and error to unequal access to care.
As patients, each of us will face at least one diagnostic error in our lifetimes. In England, conservative estimates suggest that about 5% of primary care visits result in a failure to properly diagnose, putting millions of patients in danger. In the US, diagnostic errors cause death or permanent injury to almost 800,000 people annually. Misdiagnosis is a greater risk if you’re among the one in 10 people worldwide with a rare disease.
[…]
Medical knowledge also moves faster than doctors can keep up. By graduation, half of what medical students learn is already outdated. It takes an average of 17 years for research to reach clinical practice, and with a new biomedical article published every 39 seconds, even skimming the abstracts would take about 22 hours a day. There are more than 7,000 rare diseases, with 250 more identified each year.
In contrast, AI devours medical data at lightning speed, 24/7, with no sleep and no bathroom breaks. Where doctors vary in unwanted ways, AI is consistent. And while these tools make errors too, it would be churlish to deny how impressive the latest models are, with some studies showing they vastly outperform human doctors in clinical reasoning, including for complex medical conditions.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Alan Warburton, Better Images of AI
This is the last week of Thought Shrapnel being in “low-power mode” over the summer. Please find 10 interesting things with minimal commentary ☀️
Image CC BY-NC-ND su-lin
👋 See you next week!
– Doug
Thought Shrapnel is in “low-power mode” over the summer. Please find 10 interesting things with minimal commentary ☀️
👋 See you next week!
– Doug
Thought Shrapnel is in “low-power mode” over the summer, sharing 10 interesting things with minimal commentary ☀️
👋 See you next week!
– Doug
That’s right, Thought Shrapnel continues in “low-power mode” over the summer, so I’ll continue to share 10 interesting things but provide minimal commentary ☀️
👋 Until next week!
– Doug
Thought Shrapnel is in “low-power mode” over the summer, sharing 10 interesting things with minimal commentary ☀️
👋 That’s it until next week!
– Doug
A reminder that Thought Shrapnel is in “low-power mode” over the summer. Here are 10 interesting things with minimal commentary ☀️
👋 That’s it until next week! Check out my latest week note if you’re still looking for something to read.
– Doug
Thought Shrapnel continues in low-power mode over the summer: 10 interesting things each week with minimal commentary ☀️
👋 Until next week! I’m still around so feel free to comment / hit reply on this, and let me know what you enjoyed reading.
– Doug
A reminder that Thought Shrapnel is in low-power mode over the summer. I’m continuing share 10 things each week — but in a single post, with a tiny bit of commentary ☀️
👋 There we go! I’m still on the other end of the internet, so feel free to comment / hit reply on this, and let me know what resonated.
– Doug
Thought Shrapnel is going into low-power mode for a few weeks over the summer. Instead of posting nothing at all, I’ve decided to continue to share 10 things each week — but in a single post, with minimal commentary ☀️
👋 That’s it! Have a good week. I’m still around if you comment / hit reply on this, so let me know what resonates.
– Doug
Most people know about the Internet Archive and its role in preserving the history of the web. Less well-known are archives such as Anna’s Archive and other ‘shadow libraries’. Yes, you can use shadow libraries to pirate books, but as it proudly states, it’s “The largest truly open library in human history.”
TIB — Technische Informationsbibliothek, or the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology is Germany’s national library for engineering, technology, and the natural sciences. They’ve created a ‘dark archive’ of arXiv, which is a freely accessible online archive for scientfic preprints, i.e. publications of scientific works that have not yet (fully) been peer-reviewed. These pre-prints are important for researchers accessing the latest research results.
They are explicitly doing this due to the situation in the USA at the moment, which is a good reminder to us all that the way the world used to be is not the way it is now. We should both update our mental models of how things work, and act to protect the things we hold dear.
(Interestingly, the authors note that, until fairly recently, there were mirrors held elsewhere, but the advent of fast Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) meant that mirrors felt like an ‘overhead’ and ‘inefficient. It’s a good reminder that using so-called cloud-based services simply means having your data on somebody else’s computer…)
Research and science are international, hence we are speaking of international scientific communities. A service such as arXiv might be operated by a US-based institution, Cornell University, but arXiv is being used by researchers worldwide, as, e.g., impressively evidenced by the submission statistics. Moreover, since the introduction of arXiv Membership in 2010, the funding of arXiv has been partially internationalised. TIB funds the German contribution, together with the Helmholtz Associaton of German Research Centres (HGF) und the Max Planck Society (MPG).
So when the Trump administration makes decisions that have fatal consequences for science and research in the US, the repercussions reach far beyond the Gulf of Mexico: Over the last days, reports are mounting in German media that attest to researchers not only fearing the loss of data , but also the loss of established information portals such as PubMed.
[…]
Unfortunately, a further escalation of the already dismal curtailing of academic freedom in the US appears to be likely. Not at least due to the great importance of US institutions in the international academic system, these developments affect research infrastructures worldwide. As ”Safeguarding Research and Culture” are writing in their mission statement, this warrants a change of mind, among other things towards more decentralised and thus more resilient infrastructures.
It’s worth noting that the current mirror / backup isn’t public:
The data are being stored, but if push comes to shove it would need some more steps to make them publicly available. Because a database service is much more than a mere backup copy of the data: Operating a productive user-facing service not only needs technical resources, but first and foremost a committed team which in the background takes care of diverse aspects such as quality assurance, content curation, or (technical) development.
Source: TIB blog
Image: David Pupăză
I’m loath to be critical of efforts to encourage the use of badging in the UK, but this guide from the Digital Badge Commission is partying like it’s 2019 🫤
The response to my criticism will, no doubt, be that they’re trying to keep things “simple”. Having worked in many of the sectors targeted by these exemplar badges I think the examples are both out of date and, well… just not useful.
What do I mean?
It’s all somewhat disappointing, especially as the point of Open Badges, as outlined in the 2012 Mozilla white paper, was to empower learners. This seems to be at odds with this set of exemplar badges.
I’ve also got lots of opinions about the talk of the need for ‘consistency’ going back to this post I wrote back in 2012(!) about what people mean when they talk about “rigour.”
I’ve just been helping facilitate the Digital Credentials Consortium Summit over in The Netherlands which was a really forward-thinking space. The Open Badges standard is at v3, and aligns with the Verifiable Credentials data model. The Digital Badging Commission’s resources always feel behind the curve. Where’s the discussion of badge images being optional? Of digital wallets? Of the metadata fields introduced via VC-EDU? Sigh.
If you need a discussion based on up-to-date information and relevant examples, you know where I am.
The Digital Badging Commission has launched a suite of free, customisable exemplar badges to support consistent, credible recognition of skills and learning across the UK.
Developed in partnership with practitioners from education, employment, and community sectors, the 12 templates show how digital badges can be used in real-world settings – from schools and colleges to volunteering, the arts and the workplace.
Source: Digital Badging Commission
Image: George Pagan III
I’m sharing this resource primarily to bookmark it for future reference. It’s a fantastic introductory guide for those running Open Source projects on how to get more contributors — and keep them coming back.
Along with a clear mission, easy onboarding, and a modular approach (all parts of WAO’s Architecture of Participation shown above) the guide also talks about creating a place of generosity. I couldn’t agree more. There are lots of reasons why people contribute to Open Source software but making them feel good and valuable is always important.
Be kind, friendly, and grateful. People contribute in their free time. Gratitude is the least we can offer. Kindness helps create a welcoming and respectful space. It also makes discussions and disagreements much smoother. Ideally, you want the community to be able to manage the project without needing you all the time. That starts with setting the tone.
Be as responsive as you can, but don’t expect contributors to match your speed. Some will only have time to work on weekends or late at night. If you also maintain your project in your spare time, you’ll have similar expectations. It’s okay that some PRs will take weeks (with some back and forth) before they can be merged. That’s just how open-source works sometimes.
Be ready to help. At first, you might feel like you’re losing time (“If I did it myself, it would be faster”), but that’s short-term thinking. In the medium term, if you build the right environment, people will come back, and you’ll get those valuable recurring contributors that make a project healthy.
Source: curqui-blog
As someone whose sleep quality seemed to decline from my mid-thirties, I can understand the basis for this study. It doesn’t say how many people formed the ‘panel’ whose data was collected, but they found that sleep quality is affected over a certain decibel threshold.
The reason I’m sharing this is because about a year ago I bought a pair of sleep buds (I’ve actually got the discontinued Anker Soundcore A10’s) and it’s changed my life.
My understanding is that the noise it plays desensitises you to small noises outside that would otherwise wake you up. I’ve got mine set to turn off when I’ve been asleep for 30 minutes. So if, for example, you can’t keep bedroom sound levels “beneath the low-60s dB” all night, every night, then I’d encourage you to try some sleep buds.
Our panel shows a steady, almost linear erosion of REM minutes from the low-40 dB range through the mid-50s. Once noise climbs past roughly 58–60 dB (about the loudness of normal conversation), the line kinks sharply downward—REM time falls by an additional ~15 minutes in that single step. Deep-sleep minutes follow a similar pattern, holding fairly steady below 50 dB, slipping modestly through the low-50s, then dropping 6–7 minutes once the room crosses that same upper-50s threshold. Taken together, the curves suggest a threshold effect near 60 dB where restorative stages start to collapse rather than decline gradually.
[…]
The red dashed lines mark the single largest step-down for each series, and most of them cluster in a narrow band around 55–60 dB. Below that range, incremental quieting still buys modest gains, but above it the penalties accelerate: REM and deep minutes shrink by roughly a quarter, total sleep contract by about an hour, HR climbs by several beats per minute, and HRV flattens out.
Practically, that suggests a threshold effect: keeping bedroom sound levels beneath the low-60s dB (roughly the volume of normal conversation) is a pivotal target for preserving restorative sleep stages and the physiologic calm that goes with them.
Source: Empirical
If you identify as male and are reading this, the chances are that you already know that you talk too much, or that you will learn that you do at some point in the future. This article, is therefore for you.
I still have a long way to go: although I don’t mean to, I interrupt people (especially women) and generally try and tell other people what is in my head. But I’m trying and I’m getting better at all of this. I also try and either explicitly or implicitly point out some of this to other men, while including women in conversations more.
At the end of the day, it’s about being interested in other people, not feeling like every silence has to be filled, and a room of n people, trying to ensure that you speak 1/nth of the time.
Men in public spaces, according to research, talk more than women, talk over women, and talk down to women, contributing to the rise of gender neologisms such as manologuing, bropropriating and mansplaining. So, aware that men tend to dominate and disrupt, aware that the world at large feels unbearably loud, aware that I, too, often add to that noise, I decided to learn to keep my mouth shut – starting in the general hellscape of social media.
[…]
I once live-tweeted my experience reading War and Peace just to show that I was the sort of person who read War and Peace. Life events fell victim to the social media lens. I could not simply enjoy Christmas or birthdays: I framed events in odd ways, repurposed them in pursuit of dopamine. “Books, booze and cherry blossoms,” I once tweeted, after workshopping the image and tagline with my partner on our anniversary. Nothing was sacred, nothing real, everything permitted.
[…]
Talking less in real life proved a tougher ordeal. My family are rough around the edges, my friends are on the wrong side of unruly: the people I love seldom get to finish sentences. I have often felt that my overtalking relied on the desire to be heard, a Darwinian survival of the loudest. But communication coach Weirong Li told me that the compulsion to talk often stems from the desire to escape silence. “Most people speak to avoid discomfort – not because they have something essential to say.” That rang true: the urge to avoid awkward silences has always felt urgent.
[…]
People who can tolerate uncomfortable silences are typically better listeners. Studies show that embracing awkward silences improves emotional self-regulation, fosters empathy and builds trust between conversational partners. I asked a friend, Makomborero Kasipo, a writer and registrar in psychiatry, to characterise my overtalking. “You talk to fill silence,” she said. “You express yourself, which is good, but then feel the need to defend what you have just expressed, then defend that against an imagined response, then apologise for talking too much, then apologise for apologising.” Mako offered advice: learn to feel comfortable in silence. “Develop the skill to let silence breathe.”
[…]
Talking less is not just about limiting the compulsion to talk. It’s also about changing the ways in which we converse. One of my main problems, according to my partner and any logical observer, was conversational narcissism: the art of bringing every discussion back to me. I’m very good at it. Most of us are. Sociologist Charles Derber recorded more than 100 dinner conversations and found two types of reaction: the support and the shift response. The support response is the lovely one, the bread and butter of therapists, the one that builds on the initial talker’s points and draws further discussion. A New Yorker cartoon depicts the bad response, the more common response, the shift response, as a man in a blazer at a dinner party says, “Behold, as I guide our conversation to my narrow area of expertise.”
[…]
Practise listening and you’ll stop talking. Active listening has become a buzzword, abused by droves of middle managers, corporate gurus and lifestyle coaches. Listening, to them, depends on the right sort of nod, mirrored questions and choreographed body language, always in pursuit of a goal: to make a sale, gain a promotion, secure a date, and so on. It is listening as performance. Emphasis remains on the outcome, not the process. But active listening, in its initial form, focuses on the talker. It is a skill that demands full attention, use of all the senses, the removal of obstacles to comprehension, and excavating meaning below intent.
Source: The Guardian
Image: The New Yorker
As Stephen Downes notes, Creative Commons (CC) has announced a new framework for signalling preferences around AI training. Building on an IETF draft standard, the idea is that creators can use machine-readable tags to express whether their work should be used for training AI, and if so, under what conditions.
Echoing the existing CC licenses, the ‘conditions’ might be providing credit to others, a financial contribution, or open-sourcing the resulting AI models. This all sounds well-intentioned, and you’d think I’d be in support of it. I’m a CC Fellow, after all. But instead, it feels out of touch with the reality of how large AI companies operate.
Stephen has already pointed out that this approach creates a pretend layer of control as CC Signals are not legally binding — and those with the most to gain from ignoring them are the least likely to pay attention. Our collective experience with robots.txt should probably serve as a warning for this: respect for voluntary signals only lasts as long as it suits the interests of those scraping the content.
Creative Commons licenses were created a couple of decades ago to allow creators to share their work openly and freely. CC Signals is attempting to protect creators, which is admirable, but makes the relationship transactional and so shifts CC away from its roots in open sharing. As the framework lacks any real mechanism for enforcement, there’s little to stop powerful actors from simply disregarding these preferences. It’s shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.
TL;DR: technical standards are useful, but without legal backing or industry buy-in, this is little more than a polite request. I think the commons deserves more than a new version of robots.txt that can be ignored at scale.
Since the inception of CC, there have been two sides to the licenses. There’s the legal side, which describes in explicit and legally sound terms, what rights are granted for a particular item. But, equally there’s the social side, which is communicated when someone applies the CC icons. The icon acts as identification, a badge, a symbol that we are in this together, and that’s why we are sharing. Whether it’s scientific research, educational materials, or poetry, when it’s marked with a CC license it’s also accompanied by a social agreement which is anchored in reciprocity. This is for all of us.
[…]
Reciprocity in the age of AI means fostering a mutually beneficial relationship between creators/data stewards and AI model builders. For AI model builders who disproportionately benefit from the commons, reciprocity is a way of giving back to the commons that is community and context specific.
(And in case it wasn’t already clear, this piece isn’t about policy or laws, but about centering people).
Source: Creative Commons
I’ve been listening to KNEECAP for the last couple of years since hearing one of their tracks on BBC 6 Music. And I really enjoyed the lightly fictionalised self-titled film of their origin story. But the best thing about them, I think, is how unashamedly political they are.
This has managed to get the trio (DJ Próvai, Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap) into a spot of bother, especially in the political climate where pointing out that Israel is carrying out a genocide against innocent Palestinians is, apparently, a controversial statement?
It’s always worth looking at who the establishment try to proscribe. Sometimes it’s because they’re speaking truth to power.
Israel has been carrying out a full-scale military campaign on occupied Gaza for almost two years, an onslaught triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed. The UN has found Israel’s military actions to be consistent with genocide, while Amnesty International and others have claimed Israel has shown an “intent to destroy” the Palestinian people. At least 56,000 Palestinians are now missing or dead, with studies at Yale and other universities suggesting the official tolls are being underestimated. (In July 2024, the Lancet medical journal estimated the true death toll at that point could be more than 186,000.) But away from Kneecap and other outspoken artists, across the creative industries as a whole relatively few have spoken about Gaza in such stark terms.
“The genocide in Palestine is a big reason we’re getting such big crowds at our gigs, because we are willing to put that message out there,” says Ó hAnnaidh. “Mainstream media has been trying to suppress that idea about the struggle in Palestine. People are looking at us as, I don’t know, a beacon of hope in some way – that this message will not be suppressed. The music is one thing, but the message is a big part of why we’re getting across.”
As working-class, early-career musicians, Kneecap have a lot more to lose by speaking out than more prominent artists, but Ó Cairealláin says this is beside the point. “You can get kind of bogged down talking about the people who aren’t talking enough or doing enough, but for us, it’s about talking about Palestine instead of pointing fingers,” he says. “There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of bands out there who could do a lot more, but hopefully just spreading awareness and being vocal and being unafraid will encourage them.”
Ó Dochartaigh adds: “We just want to stop people being murdered. There’s people starving to death, people being bombed every day. That’s the stuff we need to talk about, not fucking artists.”
There’s no doubt that Kneecap’s fearlessness when it comes to speaking about Palestine is a key part of their appeal for many: during a headline set at London’s Wide Awake festival last month, days after Ó hAnnaidh was charged for support of a terror organisation, an estimated 22,000 people chanted along with their calls of “free, free Palestine”. And thousands showed up to their Coachella sets – which the band allege is why so many pro-Israel groups were quick to push back on them, despite the fact that they had been displaying pro-Palestine messages for such a long time.
“We knew exactly that this was going to happen, maybe not to the extreme [level] that it has, but we knew that the Israeli lobbyists and the American government weren’t going to stand by idly while we spoke to thousands of young Americans who agree with us,” says Ó hAnnaidh. “They don’t want us coming to the American festivals, because they don’t want videos of young Americans chanting ‘free Palestine’ [even though] that is the actual belief in America. They just want to suppress it.”
The support for the message, says Ó Dochartaigh is “all genders, all religions, all colours, all creeds. Everybody knows what’s happening is wrong. You can’t even try to deny it now – Israel’s government is just acting with impunity and getting away with it. Us speaking out is a small detail – it’s the world’s governments that need to do something about it.”
Source: The Guardian
Three years ago I created a Fediverse instance called exercise.cafe for discussion related to fitness and exercise. I handed that over a year later, realising that discussion without data wasn’t really much use in that context.
Thanks to the latest update which I discovered thanks to Laurens Hof, there’s a new option: wanderer. It’s a “self-hosted trails database” which the developer says now has the functionality to “follow users, comment, like, share trails, and more across instances.”
I can imagine groups of friends who go hiking together, running or cycling clubs, or all kinds of enthusiasts using this. It’s great news, and I’m looking forward to giving it a try.
wanderer is a decentralized, self-hosted trail database. You can upload your recorded GPS tracks or create new ones and add various metadata to build an easily searchable catalogue.
Whether you’re hiking through remote mountains or biking across the city, wanderer makes it easy to plan, record, and revisit your adventures. Draw new routes, upload GPS files, and access your trail data from any device — all while keeping full control over your data.
Already tracking your adventures with Komoot or Strava? wanderer makes it easy to bring your existing trail history with you. With built-in support for both platforms, you can import your routes and activities directly — no file conversions needed. Consolidate your outdoor journeys in one place, fully under your control.
wanderer isn’t just about trails — it’s about the people who share them. Follow other users to see their latest routes, like and comment on trails you love, and get notified when someone adds something new. Whether you’re part of a local hiking group or just discovering new paths, wanderer makes it easy to stay connected — across instances and platforms.
Source: wanderer
As ever, there’s a lot in this post by Audrey Watters. Her depth of knowledge, range, and experience means that she packs a lot into this article. I haven’t excerpted the parts where she talks about AI because, although valuable, relevant, and insightful, I think that the AI “crisis” (if we can call it that) in Higher Education is largely one of its own making.
I, the product of several universities, am composing this an airport sipping a matcha latte, on my way to help facilitate an event around digital credentialing in Higher Education. There is, and always has been, an air of privilege around graduating from a university — especially an elite one. The experience of going away as (usually) an 18 year old, studying at a high(er) level, and experimenting with one’s identity cannot be reduced to the credential that comes at the end of one’s studies. As a signal, it’s not granular enough to be anything other than a proxy for reinforcing vibes, prejudice, and class.
This is why I’ve been so interested in Open Badges over the last 14 years. It’s a way of putting the “means of credentialing” into the hands of everybody — although, of course, it’s helped reinforce the power of some incumbents.
Back to the article, and Audrey says something with which I fundamentally agree, and which she puts with an elegance I could never muster: we need to be investing more in people than technology. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but what this means in practice is for universities to think about where they are investing their money. Just as we’re advising Amnesty International UK at the moment, you need to think really carefully about who controls the systems and data that you’re using to try and make the world a better place.
Back in 2012 (“the year of the MOOC”), when Sebastian Thrun told Wired that, in fifty years time there would only be ten universities left in the world and his startup Udacity had a chance to be one of them, I admit, I laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed – mostly at the idea that Udacity would still be around in a decade let alone five. The startup, while never profitable or even, in the words of its own founder, any damn good, was hailed as a “tech unicorn” and valued at over a billion dollars… at least until it was acquired by Accenture last year for an undisclosed amount of money and folded into the latter’s AI teaching platform. So I’m pretty confident in saying that no, in fifty years time, Udacity will not be around.
But the question of whether or not there’ll be ten universities left in the world remains an open one, sadly, as the attacks on education have only grown in the past few years.
[…]
The Trump Administration, along with Silicon Valley, are fully committed to the destruction of higher education – the destruction of specific institutions to be sure (Harvard and Columbia, most obviously), but to the entire university project. What we are witnessing is an attack on public institutions certainly, but also on the whole idea of education as a public good. It is, as Adam Serwer argues in The Atlantic, an attack on knowledge itself.
To retain any institutions of higher education in this onslaught from techno-authoritarianism requires – now and hereafter – we redesign them, reorient them towards human knowledge and human flourishing, away from compliance and cowardice. This means quite literally an investment in humans, not in technology infrastructure – particularly not infrastructure owned and controlled by powerful monopolies, hell-bent on profiteering and extraction, hell-bent on creating a world in which we’re all drained of agency and autonomy and, above all, of the confidence in our own intelligence and capabilities. Building human capacity in schools requires supporting more teachers and researchers and librarians, not fewer – people whose understanding of information access, knowledge sharing, and knowledge development exists far, far beyond the systems sold to schools, systems that actually serve to circumscribe what we do and how we think; people who care about people, who care about knowledge as a collective good, who care about education as a core pillar of democracy, as practice of freedom not as a market, not as a credential.
Source: Second Breakfast
Image: Andrew MacDonald
Since writing the post I’m about to cite, the author has passed away. It was recommended to me by Bryan Alexander, someone who I have the privilege to say replies to my Thought Shrapnel digest every week. We have a little back and forth, and that’s it until the next weekend; it is from these small interactions that we weave our relationships and our lives.
The author of the post, Helen De Cruz, held the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University. She was only a couple of years older than me, being born in 1978, but seemingly packed a lot into those years — including editing and illustrating Philosophy Illustrated: Forty-Two Thought Experiments to Broaden Your Mind. (Interestingly, I was using a book on the shelves in my home office called Philographics just yesterday to explain some philosophical concepts to my teenage daughter. Of course the first one she wanted explaining was epiphenomenalism 😅)
Helen wrote this post — her last — while receiving hospice care last month, saying that writing it took “days rather than just one morning or afternoon.” It’s funny how those about to die have moments of clarity that few of us manage in our lifetime. The title of the post, not unsurprisingly, is Can’t take it with you. What I like about it is that it expresses what Aristotle would have called _eudaimonia, that it is through our own flourishing that we contribute to the happiness of others.
The richest man on earth is not happy yet he can buy and do whatever he wants. When we cherish people of the past they were not particularly wealthy. Marie Curie, Vincent Van Gogh, our wise grandmother … we love these people because of what they left us. Not because of what they had.
[…]
At funerals and other occasions we also notice that we cherish others for their quirks. Someone, say a recently deceased can be remembered as kind and loving, but also: he loved fishing and was a great Cardinals fan. It seems puzzling that being a sports fan contributes to someone’s virtue. But it does, because that was part of what made him who he is. Mark Alfano has done systematic studies on this by looking at obituaries and they show that the surviving relatives seem to think being a sports fan is a virtue. As is being a dancer or birder.
Susan Wolf already remarked in Moral saints that a perfectly moral being who would always act to help others would be boring. Such a person would not have hobbies or quirks. It’s all time that could be spent better. Yet, somehow these are valued and we love them in others. This intuition bolsters the idea that having projects and passions can be a virtue. But how?
Audre Lorde and Spinoza helped me to see that being a good person means flourishing in many domains. Lorde saw herself as a poet foremost, as Caleb Ward explains in his monograph on Lorde (in progress). But she was also a Black woman, a mother, an activist, and a lesbian (“a woman who loves other women” as she called it). She insisted on being recognised in all her dimensions.
Spinoza counterintuitively argued for an ethical egoism in Ethics. He says we need to benefit ourselves. But our selves are in his picture finite expressions of God. And in our limited way, we can be perfect. Becoming very rich, powerful or prestigious is not benefiting yourself because these are empty goods in his view. This explains why the richest man on earth is not happy and keeps on seeking validation.
Pursuing empty goods of prestige, honor you become anxious because, for instance, prestige is dependent on what others think of you. It is exhausting, hence Spinoza decided that he didn’t care of what others thought of him. And we still value his work for that.
Instead, you benefit yourself by expressing yourself as a full being, as a rose bush that flowers fully. People also delight in you.
Source: Wondering Freely
Image: Raimond Klavins
Sadly, this this poster was sold out and removed from Johnny Greenteeth’s store before I was ready to buy it. I wasn’t sure about it being DayGlo! But then, I remembered that episode of Frasier where he explains that his style is “eclectic” and if you have good stuff it just all goes together…
Discovered via Warren Ellis the text is from John Ball, priest and one of the leaders of the Peasant’s Revolt in England during 1381:
My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.
Ball was the one who famously said:
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
I think you can tell a lot about people by thinking about which side of the Peasant’s Revolt they would have been on. Also, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, and don’t already know about the times when England has been close to revolution, then I recommend also reading about the Levellers and the Diggers who were prominent during the English Civil Wars in the 17th century.
Just before composing this post, I created a Signal group for an upcoming event. Signal is my standard way to communicate with other people because it’s encrypted and not controlled by a Big Tech organisation. Why wouldn’t you want your conversations to be private by default?
We’re working with Amnesty International UK at the moment on a new community platform. One of the things that we’ll be recommending is that they think not just about the community platform itself, but about the ecosystem and the stack of technologies used by activists. We’d recommend that Signal is part of this.
If you’re new to Signal, especially if you operate in a sensitive context, you’ll find this post useful. The author, Micah Lee, has worked for the EFF and _The Intercept, he co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and develops tools like OnionShare and Dangerzone. He knows his stuff.
Signal groups, in particular, are more powerful than you might be aware of, even if you already use them all the time. In this post I’ll show you how to:
- Turn an in-person meeting into a Signal group using QR codes
- Manage large semi-public groups while still vetting new members
- Make announcement-only groups, perfect for volunteer networks rapidly responding to things like ICE raids
In particular, I appreciated the advice of how to set up semi-public group chats, but with vetting:
I’m in a Signal group with about 500 people from around the world that focuses on digital rights. I’ve known some people in the group for years, but others I’ve never met. Still, it’s a safe place to discuss human rights tech issues without worrying about infiltration by fascists.
The rules include, “Be cool and be kind, or be kicked out,” and “New members need to be vouched for by an existing member.” There are five admins. If I have a friend who I think would be good to add to the group, I can invite them, and then vouch for them in the group, and one of the admins can let them in. If someone tries joining and no one vouches for them, they don’t get let in.
Signal groups make it possible to have semi-public, but still incredibly private, spaces like this. If we want to grow movements, we need to welcome many, many more people. Everyone isn’t going to know and trust everyone else, so a simple rule like “you need an existing member to vouch for you” is a great way to keep out the riff-raff. You can always choose to make more strict rules if you want, like requiring two people to vouch for new members.
He also explains how to have an announcement-only Signal group which is useful for organising, linking to this article about Sunbird, “an anonymous, real-time announcement and coordination platform” which uses this feature.
Source: [micahflee](micahflee.com/using-sig…
Image: Mika Baumeister
I suppose I should say something about this MIT research about the use of LLMs for essay writing. I can guarantee you that most people who are using this paper to justify the position that “the use of LLMs is a bad thing” haven’t even read the proper abstract, never mind the full paper. There’s a lot of “news” about it, which mostly links to this press release.
So let’s actually look at the properly, shall we? We’ll start with part of the actual abstract from the academic paper:
We assigned participants to three groups: LLM group, Search Engine group, Brain-only group, where each participant used a designated tool (or no tool in the latter) to write an essay. We conducted 3 sessions with the same group assignment for each participant. In the 4th session we asked LLM group participants to use no tools (we refer to them as LLM-to-Brain), and the Brain-only group participants were asked to use LLM (Brain-to-LLM). We recruited a total of 54 participants for Sessions 1, 2, 3, and 18 participants among them completed session 4.
The 54 participants is a red herring, as the claims being made in this paper are based on the number of people who completed the fourth session — a total of 18 participants. Nine first used no tool, and then used an LLM (“Brain-to-LLM”) and first used an LLM and then no tool (“LLM-to-Brain”).
There’s lots of neuroscience in this paper which I’m not in a position to comment on. What I am in a position to comment on is the research design, the claims being made, and the language used to express them. The first thing I’d say is the press release being titled Your Brain on ChatGPT is purposely channeling the This Is Your Brain On Drugs commercial which aired in the US in the 1980s. I’m not sure that’s a very neutral framing.
Second, any time I see an uncritical reference to “Cognitive Load Theory” in an academic paper, it’s a huge red flag for me. As Alfie Kohn points out it’s usually a way of justifying direct instruction. In other words, centring the teacher instead of the learner.
Third, the paper is poorly organised and written. For example, if one of my GCSE students back in the day had written the following, I’d have underlined it in red and written “VAGUE” next to it:
Overall, the debate between search engines and LLMs is quite polarized and the new wave of LLMs is about to undoubtedly shape how people learn.
One of the funniest things about the paper, though, is that the authors undoubtedly used AI to write sections of it. For example, here’s a random paragraph (p.19)
So using LLMs is bad for essay-writing, but good for writing academic articles? Please.
I could continue. For example, the research design was terrible (a random collection of people with different levels of educational experience and qualifications), session 4 was optional, and the participants had 20 minutes to write an essay, in amongst other things. I mean, if someone gave you the following, pointed you at an LLM and gave you 20 minutes, what would you do?
Many people believe that loyalty whether to an individual, an organization, or a nation means unconditional and unquestioning support no matter what. To these people, the withdrawal of support is by definition a betrayal of loyalty. But doesn’t true loyalty sometimes require us to be critical of those we are loyal to? If we see that they are doing something that we believe is wrong, doesn’t true loyalty require us to speak up, even if we must be critical?
It’s not like they were being prompted to turn in an actual paper. Unlike the authors of this poor excuse for one.
Anyway, life is short and this paper is terrible. I’ll continue to use LLMs in my everyday work, and have zero issues with students using them to complete badly-designed assessment tasks. Final note: academics using LLMs (sometimes to write part of their papers!) while chiding students for doing so is abject hypocrisy.
Source: arXiv
Images: Growtika / Screenshot from GPTzero
Update: I just saw, via a link from Stephen Downes, a TIME Magazine article about this paper which says it hasn’t been peer reviewed. I missed that fact, and while the process isn’t infallible it explains a lot…
Ryan Broderick is spot in this piece for Garbage Day about misinformation and disinformation. I do wonder why you’d want to continue using a service where you’re not quite sure what or who to believe. But then, I guess when most people are getting their news from social media, that is their information environment and questioning it might feel like questioning reality itself.
We live at a time where extremely high-resolution and extraordinarily detailed fake news can be generated almost instantly. But also, the threshold is (and always has been) extremely low for getting people to believe things — as the recent post about prompt injecting reality showed. When people spend so long online and don’t curate their own information environment, the habitus that guides their social actions can be actively dangerous.
You’d think the imminent breakdown of the global order would be worrying people more, but it’s hard to pay attention when you’re busy using AI to channel spirits and have ChatGPT-induced psychotic episodes. According to TikTokers, ChatGPT can “lift the veil between dimensions.” There’s also a guy on X who’s struggling to change the temperature of his AI-powered bed at the moment. The verified X user currently painting their roof blue to protect themselves from “direct energy weapons,” however, did not get the idea from an AI. They’re just the normal kind of internet insane.
[…]
It doesn’t matter if anyone believes the unreality of what they’re seeing online. Misinformation and disinformation don’t actually need to convince anyone of anything to have an impact. They just need to make you question what you’re seeing. The Big Lie and the millions of small ones online, whatever they happen to be wherever you’re living right now, just have to cause division. To wear you down. To provide an opening for those in power, who now have both too much of it and too few concerns about how to wield it. The populist demagogues and ravenous oligarchs the internet gave birth to in the 2010s are now firmly at the helm of the global order and, also, hooked up to the same chaotic, emotionally-gratifying global information networks that we all are, both social and, now, AI-generated. And, also like us, they are being heavily influenced by them in ways we can’t totally see or predict. Which is how we’ve ended up in a place where missiles are flying, planes are dropping out of the sky, and vulnerable people are being thrown in gulags, all while our leaders are shitposting about their big, beautiful plans for more extrajudicial arrests and genocidal territorial expansion. Assured by mindless AI chatbots that their dreams of world domination and self-enrichment are valid and noble and righteous. And there is no off ramp there. Everyone, even the folks with the nuclear codes, is entertaining themselves online as the world burns. Posting through it and monitoring the situation until it finally reaches their doorstep and forces them to look up from their phone and log off.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: Andrea De Santis
The GPQA is “a challenging dataset of 448 multiple-choice questions written by domain experts in biology, physics, and chemistry” where even experts with unrestricted access to the web only reach 64% accuracy. It’s a benchmark used to rate generative AI models and, as Ethan Mollick notes using the chart he created above, they’re getting better at the GPQA even while the cost is coming down.
I used MiniMax Agent today, a new agentic AI webapp based on MiniMax-M1, “the world’s first open-source, large-scale, hybrid-attention reasoning model” according to the press release. It was impressive, both in terms of capability and flexibility of output. The kind of chain-of-reasoning it uses is going to be very useful to knowledge workers and researchers like me.
MiniMax-M1 is probably on a par with the ChatGPT o3 model, but of course it’s both Chinese and open source, so a direct competitor to OpenAI. I stopped using OpenAI’s products in January when it became clear that using them involved about the same level of associated cringe as driving a Tesla in 2025.
The questions are reasonably objective: experts achieve 65% accuracy, and many of their errors arise not from disagreement over the correct answer to the question, but mistakes due to the question’s sheer difficulty (when accounting for this conservatively, expert agreement is 74%). In contrast, our non-experts achieve only 34% accuracy, and GPT-4 with few-shot chain-of-thought prompting achieves 39%, where 25% accuracy is random chance. This confirms that GPQA is difficult enough to be useful for scalable oversight research on future models significantly more capable than the best existing public models.
Sources: arXiv & Ethan Mollick | LinkedIn
It’s not easy to summarise this 13,000-word article by Ed Zitron, nor decide which parts to pull out and highlight. The main gist is that our economy is dominated by managers who lack real understanding of their businesses and customers. Their poor decisions are fueled by decades of neoliberal thinking, which promotes short-term gains over meaningful contributions. The name Zitron gives to these managers is “Business Idiots” who thrive on alienation and avoid accountability.
I think he’s using this term because ranting about rich people in an unequal society is pointless; most are desperately looking upwards trying to copy behaviours which might pull them out of the mire. Also, talking about “Big Tech” is meaningless, because it’s difficult for people to understand structures and systems. So, to personify things, Zitron uses “Business Idiots” to make his points. I don’t disagree with him, but it is an argument which lacks nuance, despite the number of words used and links sprinkled liberally amongst the paragraphs. What he’s really talking about, as he tends to, is generative AI.
Perhaps it’s easier to take some of the highlights I made of the article and rearrange them to make a bit more sense. I’m not saying that Zitron doesn’t make sense, just that, if I presented them in the order in which I highlighted them, they wouldn’t benefit from the structure of the entire article.
Let’s start here:
On some level, modern corporate power structures are a giant game of telephone where vibes beget further vibes, where managers only kind-of-sort-of understand what’s going on, and the more vague one’s understanding is, the more likely you are to lean toward what’s good, or easy, or makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Zitron has an issue with managers within large, hierarchical, for-profit businesses. He talks about hiring being broken (something I’ve talked about a lot) but in a way which situates it with the “vibe-based structure” outlined above:
We live in a symbolic economy where we apply for jobs, writing CVs and cover letters to resemble a certain kind of hire, with our resume read by someone who doesn’t do or understand our job, but yet is responsible for determining whether we’re worthy of going to the next step of the hiring process. All this so that we might get an interview with a manager or executive who will decide whether they think we can do it. We are managed by people whose job is implicitly not to do work, but oversee it. We are, as children (and young adults), encouraged to aspire to become a manager or executive, to “own our own business,” to “have people that work for us,” and the terms of our society are, by default, that management is not a role you work at, so much as a position you hold — a figurehead that passes the buck and makes far more of them than you do.
[…]
It’s about “managing people,” and that can mean just about anything, but often means “who do I take credit from or pass blame to,” because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up.
I don’t think this is a modern phenomenon. I think that someone reading this in, say, the 1960s, would recognise this problem. The issue is hierarchy. The issue is capitalism.
The difference is that we now live within a neoliberal world order. But, again, Zitron isn’t really saying anything new here when again, later in the article, talks about us living in a “symbolic society.” The situationists such as Guy Debord were talking about this decades ago. It has long been thus.
I believe this process has created a symbolic society — one where people are elevated not by any actual ability to do something or knowledge they may have, but by their ability to make the right noises and look the right way to get ahead. The power structures of modern society are run by business idiots — people that have learned enough to impress the people above them, because the business idiots have had power for decades. They have bred out true meritocracy or achievement or value-creation in favor of symbolic growth and superficial intelligence, because real work is hard, and there are so many of them in power they’ve all found a way to work together.
What has changed — and this why I prefer reading someone measured and insightful like Cory Doctorow — is that the policy environment has changed. This has enabled and encouraged what Zitron calls the “business idiot” to flourish.
Big companies build products sold by specious executives or managers to other specious executives, and thus the products themselves stop resembling things that solve problems so much as they resemble a solution. After all, the person buying it — at least at the scale of a public company — isn’t necessarily the recipient of the final product, so they too are trained (and selected) to make calls based on vibes.
[…]
Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such. Every government, the top quarter of every org chart, features little Neros who, instead of battling the fire engulfing Rome, are sat in their palaces strumming an off-key version of “Wonderwall” on the lyre and grumbling about how the firefighters need to work harder, and maybe we could replace them with an LLM and a smart sprinkler system.
The reason that executives can move between the top echelons of society even after serial failure is because of regulatory capture and the resultant lack of punishment for white-collar crime. If we rinse-and-repeat this kind of behaviour enough, we end up with money moving to the top of society at the expense of the rest of us. Governments, frightened of the elites, impose austerity policies, enter “public-private partnerships” and otherwise indemnify rich people from the downsides of their speculation.
Our economy in the west is therefore one where the only real game in town is to create products and services for individuals and businesses with money. And because of the regulatory environment, these are not, by and large good companies that exist to promote human flourishing:
The Business Idiot’s economy is one built for other Business Idiots. They can only make things that sell to companies that must always be in flux — which is the preferred environment of the Business Idiot, because if they’re not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new “innovations,” they’d actually have to interact with the underlying production of the company. As these men – and it’s almost almost men – gain more political power, this situation is only likely to get worse. “You should believe people when they tell you who they are,” is advice I’ve been given before. You should also believe people when they tell you what their version of a utopian future looks like. I’m not sure the general population’s vision is in line with that of tech billionaires: These people are antithetical to what’s good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive, and honestly any true innovation. The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about.
They’re building products for other people that don’t interact with the real world. We are no longer their customers, and so, we’re worth even less than before — which, as is the case in a world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much.
They do not exist to make us better — the Business Idiot doesn’t really care about the real world, or what you do, or who you are, or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the Musks and Altmans of the world, because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, someone above work, and thinking, and knowledge.
[…]
These people don’t want to automate work, they want to automate existence. They fantasize about hitting a button and something happening, because experiencing — living! — is beneath them, or at least your lives and your wants and your joy are. They don’t want to plan their kids’ birthday parties. They don’t want to research things. They don’t value culture or art or beauty. They want to skip to the end, hit fast-forward on anything, because human struggle is for the poor or unworthy.
Meanwhile, of course, young people – and especially young men – are spending hours each day on social media platforms owned by these tech billionaires. Their algorithms valorise topics and ideas which promote various forms of alienation. I’m not particularly hopeful for the future, especially after reading articles like this.
But the thing is, I think that writers such as Zitron have a duty to spell out the kind of utopia that he thinks we should be striving for. As with other techno-critics, it’s all very well pointing out how terrible things and people are, but if this is what you are doing, you need to be explicit about your position. What do you stand for? It’s very easy to point and one thing after another saying “this is terrible,” “that person is awful,” “this is broken,” etc. What’s much harder is to argue and fight for a world where the things you dislike are fixed.
Source: Where’s Your Ed At
Image: Hoyoun Lee
It’s easy to think that people who fall for misinformation are somehow stupid. However, a lot of what counts as ‘plausible’ information depends on the context in which its presented. Sending out a million fake ‘DHL has got your parcel and needs extra payment’ messages is successful to the scammer if 1% of recipients are expecting such a parcel. If 0.01% of the overall group click on the link, that’s still 100 people scammed.
You may or may not have seen that there has been some ‘backlash’ about the design changes in iOS 26. The approach, named “Liquid Glass” has been criticised by accessibility and usability experts, which leads to this plausible-looking tweet:
Several news outlets reported on this as fact, meaning that Google News ended up looking like this (screenshot by Georg Zoeller:
Fake news, but with real consequences. Is Yongfook what he says he is? Of course not! (screenshot again by Georg Zoeller):
As I said many moons ago, our information environment is crucial to a flourishing democracy and civil society
Source: The Quint
There was a time, in the BuzzFeed era, where ‘listicles’ were everywhere. It seemed like everything was a list, and you couldn’t escape them. A decade or so later, we’re seeing more of a balance in the force, and so lists are useful rather than egregious.
This list in The Guardian is entitled ‘52 tiny annoying problems, solved!’ and I’d like to share a few of the suggestions which caught my eye.
I have a sandwich bag in my fridge of all the odds and ends of cheese; they keep for ages. I would always freeze feta, though, as it doesn’t last long. Likewise, keep any last little bits of carrot, onion or other veg in a bag and next time you are making a ragu or soup, chuck them in. If you buy a pot of cream for a recipe and use only a small amount, freeze the rest in an ice cube tray. Do the same with wine. GH
One idea I’ve found useful for dealing with irritating interruptions when you’re trying to concentrate is: be careful not to define more things than necessary as “interruptions”. If you’re the kind of person who tries to schedule your whole day very strictly, you’re pretty much asking to feel annoyed when reality collides with your rigid plan. If you have autonomy over your schedule, a better idea is to try to safeguard three or four hours at most for total focus – this is, it turns out, the maximum countless authors, scientists and artists have managed in an uninterrupted fashion anyway. If I’m working at home on a day when it’s not my turn for school pickup, and my son bursts in to tell me excitedly about something he’s done, it’s a shame if I feel annoyed by the intrusion rather than delighted by the serendipitous interaction, solely because I’ve defined that period as time for deep focus. OB
I discovered this by accident, but unsolicited door-knockers are eager to conclude their business and go away if you open the door while holding some kind of large electric gardening implement. I just happened to be carrying a hedge trimmer when the bell rang, but a chainsaw would be even better. You could leave it on a hook by the door. TD
Sooner or later, if you are running you will get a big bastard blister on your heel, and there is no point using anything other than one of those expensive padded blister plasters. Normal plasters won’t get you home without pain, or let you run again next day. PD
When someone has a minor injury, such as stubbing their toe, give them a full minute to themselves so they can enter, then exit, their “bubble of pain”. This is what we do in our family and I swear it helps get rid of pain much faster. We don’t ask, “What happened?” or, “Are you OK?” until the injured person speaks first. A hand on their shoulder or a respectful bowing of the head to the Gods of Minor Pain is sufficient at this time. Anonymous
May I just +1 the advice about blister plasters? If you’ve never used them, I don’t think you can possibly understand how much better they are than regular plasters. Next time you’re stocking up your first aid kid, consider buying some!
Source: The Guardian
Image: Seaview N.
I can’t believe it’s been 12 years since I published a series of posts entitled Minimum Viable Bureaucracy, based on the work of Laura Thomson, who worked for the Mozilla Corporation (while I was at the Foundation).
So what’s it about? What is ‘Minimum Viable Bureaucracy’ (MVB)? Well, as Laura rather succinctly explains, it’s the difference between ‘getting your ducks in a row’ and ‘having self-organising ducks’. MVB is a way of having just enough process to make things work, but not so much as to make it cumbersome. It’s named after Eric Ries’ idea of a Minimum Viable Product which, “has just those features that allow the product to be deployed, and no more.”
The contents of Laura’s talk include:
- Basics of chaordic systems
- Building trust and preserving autonomy
- Effective communication practices
- Problem solving in a less-structured environment
- Goals, scheduling, and anti-estimation
- Shipping and managing scope creep and perfectionism
- How to lead instead of merely managing
- Emergent process and how to iterate
I truly believe that MVB is an approach that can be used in whole or in part in any kind of organisation. Obviously, a technology company with a talented, tech-savvy, distributed workforce is going to be an ideal testbed, but there’s much in here that can be adopted by even the most reactionary, stuffy institution.
I’ve spent nine of the last ten years since leaving Mozilla as part of a worker-owned cooperative, and part of a couple of networks of co-ops. I’ve learned many, many things, including that hierarchy is just a lazy default, ways to deal with conflict, and (perhaps most importantly) consent-based decision making.
Which brings me to this post, which talks about ‘Minimum Viable Organisations’. The author, Dr Kim Foale, of the excellent GFSC. They call it a work in progress, and start with the following:
Basic principle: It should be easy (low emotional labour, low technical labour, zero cost) to start a project with a small group of people with shared goals.
The list of reasons Kim gives as to why groups ‘fail’ seems familiar to me, as it might do to you:
It’s worth noting on the last point that ‘consensus’ and ‘consent’ sound very similar but are very different approaches. With the first you’re trying to get full agreement, while with the latter you’re trying to achieve alignment.
What Kim suggests is all very sensible. Things like a written constitution, a code of conduct, a minimum commitment requirement, and a process by which members can change things. It’s an unfinished post, so I’m assuming they’re coming back to finish it off.
For me, the combination of having a stated aim, code of conduct, and working openly usually leads to good results. The minimum commitment requirement is an interesting addition, though, and one I’ll noodle on.
Source: kim.town
Image: Tomáš Petz
(I did a bit of digging and it looks like Kim’s using Quartz to power their site, probably linked to Obsidian. The idea of turning either my personal blog or Thought Shrapnel into a digital garden is quite appealing. More info on options for this here
For some reason, an article from 2012 about “Bliss” — the name given to the famous Windows XP background of a grassy hill and blue sky — was near the top of Hacker News earlier this week. The photographer, Charles O’Rear, explains how it was all very serendipitous:
For such a famous photograph, O’Rear says it was almost embarrassingly easy to make. ‘Photographers like to become famous for pictures they created,’ he told the Napa Valley Register in an interview in 2010. ‘I didn’t “create” this. I just happened to be there at the right moment and documented it.
‘If you are Ansel Adams and you take a particular picture of Half Dome [in Yosemite National Park] and want to light it in a certain way, you manipulate the light. He was famous for going into the darkroom and burning and dodging. Well, this is none of that.’
Which brings me to the post I actually want to talk about, by Lee A Johnson, who is also a professional photographer. It’s effectively a 10-year retrospective on his career, which takes in changes in his field, technology, and his own personal development. I absolutely loved reading it, and encourage you to take the time to do so.
I’m just going to excerpt some parts that (hopefully) don’t require the narrative of the rest of the post to make sense. (I wasn’t sure about casually using a photograph taken by a professional without an explicit license to illustrate this blog, so I’ve used another.)
I started writing this post on my iPhone during an overnight stay on Prince Edward Island (PEI) sometime in 2015. One stop on a short road trip in Canada. The photo I uploaded to Instagram at the time confirms that was indeed exactly a decade ago1. Since then I’ve completed a few long-term projects, visited numerous portfolio reviews, been to several countries, photographic retreats, galleries, exhibitions, book festivals, talks. All in pursuit of understanding what I’m doing with the photography I am taking.
What I’m trying to say is that the scope of the post crept over those ten years. It’s all a bit of a mess.
[…]
Photography finds itself in an interesting place. So common it’s like breathing. Everyone has a camera in their pocket, and we’re collectively producing more photographs every week than were taken in the entire 20th century. Soon that will be every day. Then every hour. Most won’t survive the next phone upgrade, let alone be seen by human eyes.
And photography is now easy, really. Easier than ever. The technicalities can be picked up by anyone in five minutes. It’s much harder and takes much longer to figure out what you want to say, to develop a visual language that’s truly your own. To create something that stands out. Something outstanding.
[…]
Ephemeral photos, long-term projects? Most of what I photograph will never matter to anyone but me. Of the tens of thousands of frames I’ve shot, perhaps a few dozen will outlive me, and even fewer will be seen by strangers a century from now. So why bother with long-term projects, with work that takes years to complete, when the cultural landscape shifts so rapidly that by the time you’re finished the conversation has moved on? Because the long-term projects, the works with depth and commitment behind them, are the ones that have any chance of lasting impact.
[…]
Drowning in culture, we skim, we rush, we skip over. At the same time we favourite too much, follow too much, the signal to noise ratio is larger than ever. Our attention has become a commodity, harvested and sold by platforms that profit from our endless scrolling. We open tabs for articles we’ll never read, save posts we’ll never revisit, follow accounts whose content blurs together into an indistinguishable stream.
[…]
Really we’re all on one big curve, an exponential curve to nowhere. Inevitable, given an exponential curve is not sustainable. The democratization of photography, the explosion of content, the fragmentation of audience - it’s all happening at a pace that makes it hard to find stable ground. We’re constantly racing to catch up, feeling behind, trying to make sense of a landscape that transforms even as we observe it7.
[…]
Almost gone are the days of a human looking at work and deciding what is worth looking at, now replaced with machine learning and algorithms to tell us instead. But what does a computer know about art? Because of that you can be sure what i’m seeing is not the same as what anyone else is seeing. A shared culture disjoint to keep you on the platform. Keep you scrolling. Keep you viewing ads.
If you jump out of your own petri dish you will always find the culture much different, this has always been the case. Now we have the web throwing all the samples in a bucket and saying have a bit of everything. If you don’t like it then the next sample is only a click away.
Does that mean the culture’s impact is diluted? Probably. Does it matter? Probably not, but it follows that if we are defined by our cultural interests then a larger variety of parts leads to a far more interesting variety of wholes. There will be fewer parts in common, if that is the case then perhaps that means we should have more to talk about. Tell me about the things I don’t know, or haven’t seen.
Fill in the gaps.
Source: leejo.github.io
Image: C D-X
It’s not often I link directly to a LinkedIn post. However, the author of this, Ben Cohen, doesn’t seem to have posted it elsewhere, so needs must. Cohen also doesn’t cite the original source of the analysis he references, but it looks like it comes from an OpenAI report entitled Identifying and scaling AI use cases in which the “six use case primitives” are:
Cohen has renamed these into much snappier “stuff” language, along with a graphic (see above) which looks like the OpenAI logo. I like this framing, it resonates.
I do wonder how many of these six use cases that vehemently anti-AI critics have actually used. I can confidently say I’ve used them all, and probably hit four of the six categories most working days at the moment.
Turns out there are only six ways to use AI well.
OpenAI looked at 600+ of the most successful GenAI use cases.
Every single one fell into just 6 categories (which I’ve taken the liberty to rename):
Create stuff → Content, policies, presentations, images, emails, contracts
Find stuff → Insights, research, competitor analysis, trends
Build stuff → Tools, websites, apps
Make sense of stuff → Data analysis, dashboards, performance reports
Think stuff through → Idea generation, strategies, decision-making
Do stuff automatically → Workflows, email automation, customer chatbots
That’s it.
Source & image: Ben Cohen | LinkedIn
Most people are very surprised when I say that I work around 20-25 hours per week. I then clarify that this is paid work, so not things like blogging, doing lots of reading, looking for business development leads, giving free advice, etc.
Still, it means that I have a life where I can exercise every day, be around for my kids, and manage my stress/anxiety levels. While not everyone runs their own business, most knowledge workers do have a fair amount of freedom. As Cal Newport points out in this article, the 4-day workweek is a way of pushing back against the expectation that a company owns all of your time.
So, I’d say that the 4-day workweek is more of a mindset change, especially if you’re getting done the same amount as before. I’d definitely try it! When I worked at Moodle, I did a 4-day week, and being able to say “I won’t be able to as I don’t work Fridays” or similar is as much as a story you tell yourself as one you tell other people.
Another thing, which we try and do at WAO is to co-work on projects, and not to switch between multiple projects within one day. So, if we’ve got three projects on the go, we’ll try and dedicate either a whole day to one, or a morning to one, an afternoon to another, and leave the third until the next day. Of course, it doesn’t always work out like that, but collaborating with others (not just having meetings with them!) and allocating time to different projects makes them not only manageable, but… maybe even enjoyable?
Most knowledge workers are granted substantial autonomy to control their workload. It’s technically up to them when to say “yes” and when to say “no” to requests, and there’s no direct supervision of their current load of tasks and projects, nor is there any guidance about what this load should ideally be.
Many workers deal with the complexity of this reality by telling themselves what I sometimes call the workload fairy tale, which is the idea that their current commitments and obligations represent the exact amount of work they need to be doing to succeed in their position.
The results of the 4-day work week experiment, however, undermine this belief. The key work – the efforts that really matter – turned out to require less than forty hours a week of effort, so even with a reduced schedule, the participants could still fit it all in. Contrary to the workload fairytale, much of our weekly work might be, from a strict value production perspective, optional.
So why is everyone always so busy? Because in modern knowledge work we associate activity with usefulness (a concept I call “pseudo-productivity” in my book), so we keep saying “yes,” or inventing frenetic digital chores, until we’ve filled in every last minute of our workweek with action. We don’t realize we’re doing this, but instead grasp onto the workload fairy tale’s insistence that our full schedule represents exactly what we need to be doing, and any less would be an abdication of our professional duties.
The results from the 4-day work week not only push back against this fairy tale, but also provide us with a hint about how we could make work better. If we treated workload management seriously, and were transparent about how much each person is doing, and what load is optimal for their position; if we were willing to experiment with different possible configurations of these loads, and strategies for keeping them sustainable, we might move closer to a productive knowledge sector (in a traditional economic sense) free of the exhausting busy freneticism that describes our current moment. A world of work with breathing room and margin, where key stuff gets the attention it deserves, but not every day is reduced to a jittery jumble.
Source: Cal Newport
Image: Dorota Dylka
Let’s say that, as often happens, I half-remember an article that I’ve been reading. It’s not in my Reader saves, so what am I going to do? Even this time last year, I would have typed what I could remember into my browser address bar, which would then take me to my default search engine: DuckDuckGo.
Over the last few months, however, for anything more complex than just quickly looking something up, I’ve been using Perplexity, which allows you to search the web (default), as well as academic and social sites such as Reddit. Unlike other LLMs, its not sycophantic, and it always shows its sources.
Casey Newton discusses the advent of the AI-first browser which uses ‘agents’ to go searching on your behalf. I’m kind of already doing this. And before you judge me, let’s just reflect on the fact that almost 40% of people click on the first result on Google results, and [fewer than 0.5% go past the first page of search engine results. So even an LLM that goes out, reads 20 links and presents back the most salient results is already doing a better job.
[T]he decline of the web has been met with a surprising counter-phenomenon: a huge investment in new web browsers.
On Wednesday, Opera — the Norwegian company whose namesake browser commands about 2 percent market share worldwide — announced that it is building a new browser.
Two days earlier, the Browser Company said it plans to open source its Arc browser and turn its efforts fully to a new one.
The moves came a few months after “answer engine” company Perplexity teased a new browser of its own called Comet. And while the company has not confirmed it, OpenAI has reportedly been working on a browser for more than six months.
It has been a long time since the internet saw a proper browser war. The first, in the earliest days of the web, saw Microsoft’s Internet Explorer defeat Netscape Navigator decisively. (Though not before a bruising antitrust trial.) In the second, which ran from roughly 2004 to 2017, new browsers from Mozilla (Firefox) and Google (Chrome) emerged to challenge Internet Explorer and eventually kill it. Today the majority of web users use Chrome.
[…]
“Traditional browsers were built to load webpages,” said Josh Miller, the Browser Company’s CEO, in a post announcing its forthcoming Dia browser. “But increasingly, webpages — apps, articles, and files — will become tool calls with AI chat interfaces. In many ways, chat interfaces are already acting like browsers: they search, read, generate, respond. They interact with APIs, LLMs, databases. And people are spending hours a day in them. If you’re skeptical, call a cousin in high school or college — natural language interfaces, which abstract away the tedium of old computing paradigms, are here to stay.”
Perplexity is one of my pinned tabs both on my desktop and laptop. I use it multiple times every day in both professional and personal contexts, for example when researching information that is helping me make a decision about car leasing. This year, I’ve also used it to help decipher medical records, pull out information from extremely dense reports, and synthesise information from multiple sources.
It does feel a bit like a superpower when you use these things well. But, as Newton points out, as the business model for putting content on the web fails, where are AI browsers going to get their information from?
[I]t’s easy to imagine the possibilities for an AI browser. It could function as a research assistant, exploring topics on your behalf and keeping tabs on new developments automatically. It could take your to-do list and attempt to complete tasks for you while you’re away. It could serve as a companion for you while you browse, identifying factual errors and suggesting further reading.
[…]
The question remains, though, what will be left to browse. The entire structure of the web — from journalism to e-commerce and beyond — is built on the idea that webpages are being viewed by people. When it’s mostly code that is doing the looking, a lot of basic assumptions are going to get broken.
Source: Platformer
Image: almoya
Technical things don’t interest most people. I’m definitely at the edges of my understanding with this one, but the implications are pretty huge. Essentially, Meta (the organisation behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) and Yandex have been caught covertly tracking users on Android devices via a novel method.
On the day that this disclosure was made public, Meta “mysteriously” stopped using this technique. But, by that point, they’d been using it for well over six months, and it appears that Yandex (a Russian tech company) has been using it for EIGHT YEARS.
The website dedicated to the disclosure is, as you’d expect, pretty technical. But it does say this:
This novel tracking method exploits unrestricted access to localhost sockets on the Android platforms, including most Android browsers. As we show, these trackers perform this practice without user awareness, as current privacy controls (e.g., sandboxing approaches, mobile platform and browser permissions, web consent models, incognito modes, resetting mobile advertising IDs, or clearing cookies) are insufficient to control and mitigate it.
We note that localhost communications may be used for legitimate purposes such as web development. However, the research community has raised concerns about localhost sockets becoming a potential vector for data leakage and persistent tracking. To the best of our knowledge, however, no evidence of real-world abuse for persistent user tracking across platforms has been reported until our disclosure.
A Spanish site called Zero Party Data, which also posts in English explains what’s going in an easier-to-understand way:
Meta devised an ingenious system (“localhost tracking”) that bypassed Android’s sandbox protections to identify you while browsing on your mobile phone — even if you used a VPN, the browser’s incognito mode, and refused or deleted cookies in every session.
[…]
Meta faces simultaneous liability under the following regulations, listed from least to most severe: GDPR, DSA, and DMA (I’m not even including the ePrivacy Directive because it’s laughable).
GDPR, DMA, and DSA protect different legal interests, so the penalties under each can be imposed cumulatively.
The combined theoretical maximum risk amounts to approximately €32 billion** (4% + 6% + 10% of Meta’s global annual revenue, which surpassed €164 billion in 2024).
Maximum fines have never before been applied simultaneously, but some might say these scoundrels have earned it.
Briefly, here’s how it works (according to the above website):
This is why I don’t use apps from Meta and use a security-hardened version of Android called GrapheneOS
Sources: Local Mess / Zero Party Data
Image: Local Mess
I’m sharing this list of “delightful fediverse apps” as it includes a couple of things (Bonfire, BadgeFed) in which I’m particularly interested. It’s also a great example of how many types of difference service can be created via a protocols-based approach.
A curated list of fediverse software that offer decentralized social networking services based on the W3C ActivityPub family of related protocols.
Source: delightful.coding.social
This is on a Google blog, so it foregrounds the use of their Gemini AI model in a new tool called Extract, built by the UK Government’s AI Incubator team. I should imagine that they’d be able to switch Gemini out for any model that has “advanced visual reasoning and multi-modal capabilities.” At least, I’d hope so.
So long as there is some kind of expert-in-the-loop, I think this is a great use of AI in public services. Planning in the UK, as I should imagine it is in most countries, is outdated, awkward, and slow. Speeding things up, especially if it allows multiple factors to be considered automatically, is a great idea.
A couple of years ago, I pored over technical documents I didn’t understand, feeding them into LLMs to try and figure out whether or not to buy a house by a river that had previously flooded, but now had flood defences. I was not an “expert-in-the-loop” but instead a “layperson-in-the-loop.” There’s a difference.
Traditional planning applications often require complex, paper-based documents. Comparing applications with local planning restrictions and approvals is a time-consuming task. Extract helps councils to quickly convert their mountains of planning documents into digital structured data, drastically reducing the barriers to adopting modern digital planning systems, and the need to manually check around 350,000 planning applications in England every year.
Once councils start using Extract, they will be able to provide more efficient planning services with simpler processes and democratised information, reducing council workload and speeding up planning processes for the public. However, converting a single planning document currently takes up to 2 hours for a planning professional – and there are hundreds of thousands of documents sitting in filing cabinets across the country. Extract can remove this bottleneck by accelerating the conversion with AI.
As the UK Government highlights, “The new generative AI tool will turn old planning documents—including blurry maps and handwritten notes—into clear, digital data in just 40 seconds – drastically reducing the time it takes planners.”
Using modern data and software, councils will be able to make informed decisions faster, which could lead to quicker application processing times for things like home improvements, and more time freed up for council staff to focus on strategic planning. Extract is being tested with planning officials at four Councils around the country including Hillingdon Council, Westminster City Council, Nuneaton and Bedworth Council and Exeter City Council and will be made available to all councils by Spring 2026.
Source: The Keyword
Not only do I really like Joan Westenberg’s blog theme (Thesis, for Ghost) but this post in particular. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my life, career, reading Stoic philosophy, and studying Systems Thinking, it’s that there are some things you can control, and some things you can’t.
Coming up with a ‘strategy’ or a ‘goal’ that does not take into account the wider context in which you do or will operate is foolish. Naive, even. Instead, setting constraints makes much more sense. What Westenberg is advocating for here, without saying it explicitly, is a systems thinking approach to life.
You can read my 3-part Introduction to Systems Thinking on the WAO blog (which, coincidentally, we’ll soon be moving to Ghost)
Setting goals feels like action. It gives you the warm sense of progress without the discomfort of change. You can spend hours calibrating, optimizing, refining your goals. You can build a Notion dashboard. You can make a spreadsheet. You can go on a dopamine-fueled productivity binge and still never do anything meaningful.
Because goals are often surrogates for clarity. We set goals when we’re uncertain about what we really want. The goal becomes a placeholder. It acts as a proxy for direction, not a result of it.
[…]
A goal set at time T is a bet on the future from a position of ignorance. The more volatile the domain, the more brittle that bet becomes.
This is where smart people get stuck. The brighter you are, the more coherent your plans tend to look on paper. But plans are scripts. And reality is improvisation.
Constraints scale better because they don’t assume knowledge. They are adaptive. They respond to feedback. A small team that decides, “We will not hire until we have product-market fit” has created a constraint that guides decisions without locking in a prediction. A founder who says, “I will only build products I can explain to a teenager in 60 seconds” is using a constraint as a filtering mechanism.
[…]
Anti-goals are constraints disguised as aversions. The entrepreneur who says, “I never want to work with clients who drain me” is sketching a boundary around their time, energy, and identity. It’s not a goal. It’s a refusal. And refusals shape lives just as powerfully as ambitions.
Source: Joan Westenberg
There are so many philosophical questions when it comes to the possible uses of AI. Being able to translate between different species' utterances is just one of them.
The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals’ interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another’s native vocabulary.
[…]
In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually?
The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal’s umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? “If a lion could talk,” writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, “we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.” We should ask, then, how speaking with other beings might change us.
Talking to another species might be very like talking to alien life. […] Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf’s theory of linguistic determinism – the idea that our experience of reality is encoded in language – was dismissed in the mid-20th century, but linguists have since argued that there may be some truth to it. Pormpuraaw speakers in northern Australia refer to time moving from east to west, rather than forwards or backwards as in English, making time indivisible from the relationship between their body and the land.
Whale songs are born from an experience of time that is radically different to ours. Humpbacks can project their voices over miles of open water; their songs span the widest oceans. Imagine the swell of oceanic feeling on which such sounds are borne. Speaking whale would expand our sense of space and time into a planetary song. I imagine we’d think very differently about polluting the ocean soundscape so carelessly.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Iván Díaz
You should, they say, “follow the money” when it comes to claims about the future. That’s why this piece by Allison Morrow is so on-point about thos made by the CEO of Anthropic about AI replacing human jobs.
If we believed billionaires then you’d be interacting with this post in the Metaverse, the first manned mission to Mars would have already taken place, and we could “believe” pandemics out of existence. So will AI have an impact on jobs? Absolutely. Will it happen in the way that some rich guy thinks? Absolutely not.
If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it’s going to ruin the global economy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality.
Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up.
ICYMI: The 42-year-old billionaire Dario Amodei, who runs the AI firm Anthropic, told Axios this week that the technology he and other companies are building could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs … sometime soon. Maybe in the next couple of years, he said.
He reiterated that claim in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday.
“AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Amodei told Cooper. “AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.”
To be clear, Amodei didn’t cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate. And that was just one of many of the wild claims he made that are increasingly part of a Silicon Valley script: AI will fix everything, but first it has to ruin everything. Why? Just trust us.
In this as-yet fictional world, “cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs,” Amodei told Axios, repeating one of the industry’s favorite unfalsifiable claims about a disease-free utopia on the horizon, courtesy of AI.
But how will the US economy, in particular, grow so robustly when the jobless masses can’t afford to buy anything? Amodei didn’t say.
[…]
Little of what Amodei told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to Anthropic’s work, days after it released a major model update to its Claude chatbot, one of the top rivals to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Amodei stands to profit off the very technology he claims will gut the labor market. But here he is, telling everyone the truth and sounding the alarm! He’s trying to warn us, he’s one of the good ones!
Yeaaahhh. So, this is kind of Anthropic’s whole ~thing.~ It refers to itself primarily as an “AI safety and research” company. They are the AI guys who see the potential harms of AI clearly — not through the rose-colored glasses worn by the techno-utopian simps over at OpenAI. (In fact, Anthropic’s founders, including Amodei, left OpenAI over ideological differences.)
Source: CNN
Image: Janet Turra & Cambridge Diversity Fund / Ground Up and Spat Out
First off, it’s worth saying that this looks and reads like a lightly-edited AI-generated newsletter, which it is. Nonetheless, given that it’s about the use of generative AI in university courses, it doesn’t feel inappropriate.
The main thrust of the argument is that students are using tools such as ChatGPT to help break down courses in ways that should be of either concern or interest to instructional designers. As a starting point, it uses the LinkedIn post in the screenshot above, which is based on OpenAI research and some findings I shared on Thought Shrapnel recently.
I can’t see how this is anything other than a positive thing, as students taking control of their own learning. We’ve all had terrible teachers, who think that because they teach, their students learn. Those who use outdated metaphors, who can’t understand how learners don’t “get it”, etc. For as long as we have the current teaching, learning, and assessment models in formal education, this feels like a useful way to hack the system.
Picture this: a learner on a course you designed opens their laptop and types into ChatGPT: “I want to learn by teaching. Ask me questions about calculus so I can practice explaining the core concepts to you.”
In essence, this learner has just become an instructional designer—identifying a gap in the learning experience and redesigning it using evidence-based pedagogical strategies.
This isn’t cheating—it’s actually something profound: a learner actively applying the protégé effect, one of the most powerful learning strategies in cognitive science, to redesign and augment an educational experience that, in theory, has been carefully crafted for them.
[…]
The data we are gathering about how our learners are using AI is uncomfortable but essential for our growth as a profession. Learner AI usage is essentially a real-time audit of our design decisions—and the results should concern every instructional designer.
[…]
When learners need AI to “make a checklist that’s easy to understand” from our assignment instructions, it reveals that we’re designing to meet organizational requirements rather than support learner success. We’re optimizing for administrative clarity rather than learning clarity.
[…]
The popularity of prompts like “I’m not feeling it today. Help me understand this lecture knowing that’s how I feel” and “Motivate me” reveals a massive gap in our design thinking. We design as if learning is purely cognitive when research clearly shows emotional state directly impacts cognitive capacity.
Source: Dr Phil’s Newsletter
Melissa Bell, CEO of Chicago Public Media, issued an apology this week which categorised the litany of human errors that led to the Chicago Sun-Times publishing a largely AI-generated supplement entitled “Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer.”
Instead of the meticulously reported summer entertainment coverage the Sun-Times staff has published for years, these pages were filled with innocuous general content: hammock instructions, summer recipes, smartphone advice … and a list of 15 books to read this summer.
Of those 15 recommended books by 15 authors, 10 titles and descriptions were false, or invented out of whole cloth.
As Bell suggests in her apology, the failure isn’t (just) a failure of AI. It’s a failure of human oversight:
Did AI play a part in our national embarrassment? Of course. But AI didn’t submit the stories, or send them out to partners, or put them in print. People did. At every step in the process, people made choices to allow this to happen.
Dan Sinker, a Chicago native, runs with this in an excellent post which has been shared widely. He calls the time we’re in the “Who Cares Era, riffing on the newspaper supplement debacle to make a bigger point.
The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either.
It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.
[…]
It’s easy to blame this all on AI, but it’s not just that. Last year I was deep in negotiations with a big-budget podcast production company. We started talking about making a deeply reported, limited-run show about the concept of living in a multiverse that I was (and still am) very excited about. But over time, our discussion kept getting dumbed down and dumbed down until finally the show wasn’t about the multiverse at all but instead had transformed into a daily chat show about the Internet, which everyone was trying to make back then. Discussions fell apart.
Looking back, it feels like a little microcosm of everything right now: Over the course of two months, we went from something smart that would demand a listener’s attention in a way that was challenging and new to something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.
So what do we do about all of this?
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.
[…]
As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.
Source: Dan Sinker
Image: Ben Thornton
It’s been the FediForum this week, an online unconference dedicated to the Open Social Web. To coincide with this, Bonfire — a project I’ve been involved with on-and-off ever since leaving Moodle* — has reached the significant stage of release candidate for v1.0.
Ivan and Mayel, the two main developers, have done a great job sustaining this project over the last five years. It was fantastic, therefore, to see a write up of Bonfire alongside another couple of Fediverse apps in an article in The Verge (which uses a screenshot of my profile!) along with a more in-depth one in TechCrunch. It’s the latter one I’m excerpting here.
There is a demo instance if you just want to have a play!
Bonfire Social, a new framework for building communities on the open social web, launched on Thursday during the FediForum online conference. While Bonfire Social is a federated app, meaning it’s powered by the same underlying protocol as Mastodon (ActivityPub), it’s designed to be more modular and more customizable. That means communities on Bonfire have more control over how the app functions, which features and defaults are in place, and what their own roadmap and priorities will include.
There’s a decidedly disruptive bent to the software, which describes itself as a place where “all living beings thrive and communities flourish, free from private interest and capitalistic control.”
[…]
Custom feeds are a key differentiation between Bonfire and traditional social media apps.
Though the idea of following custom feeds is something that’s been popularized by newer social networks like Bluesky or social browsers like Flipboard’s Surf, the tools to actually create those feeds are maintained by third parties. Bonfire instead offers its own custom feed-building tools in a simple interface that doesn’t require users to understand coding.
To build feeds, users can filter and sort content by type, date, engagement level, source instance, and more, including something it calls “circles.”
Those who lived through the Google+ era of social networks may be familiar with the concept of Circles. On Google’s social network, users organized contacts into groups, called Circles, for optimized sharing. That concept lives on at Bonfire, where a circle represents a list of people. That can be a group of friends, a fan group, local users, organizers at a mutual aid group, or anything else users can come up with. These circles are private by default but can be shared with others.
[…]
Accounts on Bonfire can also host multiple profiles that have their own followers, content, and settings. This could be useful for those who simply prefer to have both public and private profiles, but also for those who need to share a given profile with others — like a profile for a business, a publication, a collective, or a project team.
Source: TechCrunch
*Bonfire was originally a fork of MoodleNet, and not only has it since gone in a different direction, but five years later I highly doubt there’s still an original line of code. Note that the current version of MoodleNet offered by Moodle is a completely different tech stack, designed by a different team
My friend and colleague Laura Hilliger said that she understood me (and British humour in general) a lot more after watching the TV series Taskmaster. As with any culture, in the UK there are unspoken rules, norms, and ways of interacting that just feel ‘normal’ until you have to actually explain them to others.
This Reddit thread, which starts with the question What’s a seemingly minor British etiquette rule that foreigners often miss—but Brits immediately notice? is a goldmine (and pretty funny) although there’s a lot of repetition. Consider it a Brucie Bonus at the end of this week’s Thought Shrapnel, which I’m getting done early as I’m at a family wedding and an end of season presentation/barbeque this weekend!
Thank the bus driver when you get off. Even though he’s just doing his job and you paid. (Top-Ambition-6966)
Keep calm and carry on / deliberately not acknowledging something awry that’s going on nearby. (No-Drink-8544)
British culture is swearing and being sarcastic to your mates whilst simultaneously being too polite to tell someone they either need to leave or the person themselves wants to end the social interaction. (AugustineBlackwater)
If someone asks you if you’ll do something or go somewhere with them and you answer ‘maybe’….it is actually a polite way of saying no. (loveswimmingpools)
Not taking a self deprecating comment at face value, e.g. non Brit: ‘ah that sounds like a good job!’ Brit: ‘nah not really, it’s not that hard’, non Brit: ‘oh okay’. We’re just not good at taking praise so we deflect it but that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to accept the complimented’s dismissal of the compliment. All meant in playful fun of course. (Interesting_Tea_9125)
Not raising one finger slightly from your hand at the top of the steering wheel to express your deep gratitude for someone allowing you priority on the road. (callmeepee)
Drop over any time - you should schedule a visit 3 month in advance and I will still claim I am busy. (Spitting_Dabs)
Source: Reddit
Image: Adrian Raudaschl
Angus Hervey is a solutions journalist and founding editor of Fix The News. His most recent TED talk starts with doom and gloom, and ends with hope and a question:
Real life isn’t a story. History doesn’t have a moral arc. Progress isn’t a rule. It is contested terrain, fought for daily by millions of people who refuse to give in to despair. Ultimately, none of us know whether we’re living in the downswing or the upswing of history. But I do know that we all get a choice. We, all of us, get to decide which one of these stories we are a part of. We add to their grand weave in the work that we do, in the daily decisions we make about where to put our money, where to put our energy and our time, in the stories we tell each other and in the words that come out of our mouths. It is not enough to believe in something anymore. It is time to do something. Ask yourself, if our worst fears come to pass, and the monsters breach the walls, who do you want to be standing next to? The prophets of doom and the cynics who said “we told you so?” Or the people who, with their eyes wide open, dug the trenches and fetched water. Both of these stories are true. The only question that matters now is which one do you belong to?
The backstory to the talk is interesting: not only did Hervey and his partner welcome a new baby into the world just weeks before, he decided to do things a bit differently.
On the eve of my flight to Vancouver I had a script, a four-week-old baby, a ten-minute video, a seven-minute music track, and a prayer that I could hold it all together on stage.
It’s the first TED talk I’ve seen to use all three screen as a single canvas:
How do you tell a compelling visual story on a screen the size of a small building? For my last big talk, I used all three screens as a single canvas, instead of the traditional 16:9 format. This time, I wanted to go even further: a seamless, immersive experience that would make the audience forget they were watching a presentation at all.
After the initial call with the curation team, I reached out to Jordan Knight, a motion designer based in New York. Her work has this textural, flowing quality that I knew would be perfect for bringing the story to life. The concept I had in mind was ambitious, maybe foolishly so. I wanted two contrasting visual languages: the story of collapse illustrated through ink-blot shapes inspired by the alien language in Arrival - those haunting, oil-spill forms that Denis Villeneuve used so brilliantly. For progress, we’d use the opposite motif: green shoots, growth, life pushing through.
Sources: TED.com / Fix The News
One way of telling whether you live in within a technocratic regime is if politicians from the incumbent administration attempt solely to appeal to the electorate’s logic. As one of the commenters on the post I’m about to quote states, we have a “thin safety net of accessible metrics” which, unless coupled with vision and emotion can severely limit political action.
In this post by Andrew Curry, he discusses some of the things he presented as part of a talk organised around the theme of “a politics of the future.” He argues that, essentially, vibes are important:
The cultural critic Raymond Williams developed the idea of structures of feeling — which I should come back to here on another occasion — to describe changes that you could sense or feel before you could measure them.
Sometimes these appear in culture first: for example Williams describes how changing attitudes to debt in England in the 19th century were seen first in the writings of Dickens and Emily Bronte. In other words, structures of feeling signal a possible cultural hypothesis.
This “cultural hypothesis” or, to put it a different way, “politics of the future” is something that Curry discusses in the rest of this piece. It’s this which I think is missing from the current (UK) Labour government’s communications strategy at the moment. Everything seems to be about now rather than where we’re headed as a country.
[E]lections within a democracy are supposed to be a competition between different parties offering differing imagined futures.
[…]
But there’s a big hole where these imagined futures ought to be. The right tends to offer a vision of an imagined past, while centre parties, whether centre-left or centre-right, are intent on managing the present. They are focused on policy, not politics […]
The research suggests that this lack of alternatives affects voting level because people start abstaining from voting, and that the more disadvantaged are the first to drop out.
The right points to the past, glorifies it, and then points to the disadvantaged and disenfranchised as the reason why we can’t have these (imagined) nice things. The way forward for the left isn’t to ape what the right does, but to counter it by creating a politics of the future instead of the past:
Creating the collective — or perhaps creating a collective — is about building a shared idea of “we”. This is something politics, broadly described, can do, but policy can’t do. Party politics will still be a form of coalition building in the conventional sense of creating collections of interests around issues. But the element of the future imagination creates more coherence.
Source: Just Two Things
Image: Leonhard Niederwimmer
After the last post, this one helps restore my hope in blogging a little. Adam Mastroianni, whose work I have mentioned many times here, runs an annual blogging competition. I’d urge anyone reading this, especially if you haven’t currently got a blog, to enter. Putting your thoughts out there is one way to help create the world that you want to live in.
It’s through these small gestures that we tell ourselves and others who we are and what we stand for. A different example: I absolute detest advertising, and mute adverts any time they come on the TV. In addition, I block them mercilessly on the web, and encourage other people to do it. Otherwise, we accept as default other people’s versions of ‘reality’. And I’m not ready to do that, at least not quite yet.
The blogosphere has a particularly important role to play, because now more than ever, it’s where the ideas come from. Blog posts have launched movements, coined terms, raised millions, and influenced government policy, often without explicitly trying to do any of those things, and often written under goofy pseudonyms. Whatever the next vibe shift is, it’s gonna start right here.
The villains, scammers, and trolls have no compunctions about participating—to them, the internet is just another sandcastle to kick over, another crowded square where they can run a con. But well-meaning folks often hang back, abandoning the discourse to the people most interested in poisoning it. They do this, I think, for three bad reasons.
One: lots of people look at all the blogs out there and go, “Surely, there’s no room for lil ol’ me!” But there is. Blogging isn’t like riding an elevator, where each additional person makes the experience worse. It’s like a block party, where each additional person makes the experience better. As more people join, more sub-parties form—now there are enough vegan dads who want to grill mushrooms together, now there’s sufficient foot traffic to sustain a ring toss and dunk tank, now the menacing grad student next door finally has someone to talk to about Heidegger. The bigger the scene, the more numerous the niches.
Two: people will keep to themselves because they assume that blogging is best left to the professionals, as if you’re only allowed to write text on the internet if it’s your full-time job. The whole point of this gatekeeper-less free-for-all is that you can do whatever you like. Wait ten years between posts, that’s fine! The only way to do this wrong is to worry about doing it wrong.
And three: people don’t want to participate because they’re afraid no one will listen. That’s certainly possible—on the internet, everyone gets a shot, but no one gets a guarantee. Still, I’ve seen first-time blog posts go gangbusters simply because they were good. And besides, the point isn’t to reach everybody; most words are irrelevant to most people. There may be six individuals out there who are waiting for exactly the thing that only you can write, and the internet has a magical way of switchboarding the right posts to the right people.
If that ain’t enough, I’ve seen people land jobs, make friends, and fall in love, simply by posting the right words in the right order. I’ve had key pieces of my cognitive architecture remodeled by strangers on the internet. And the party’s barely gotten started.
Source: Experimental History
Image: Austin Chan
I could write a lot about the paragraph below from Audrey Watters. My first reaction is “of course there’s still an ‘open Web’ crowd!” But then, when I really think about my reaction, I realise that everyone I know who blogs regularly is at least as old as me. In addition, there are both fewer comments on blogs, or indeed no comments section at all.
I’ve decided to stop blogging. I know, I know. A cardinal sin among the “open Web” crowd. But see, there’s no such thing anymore – not sure there ever really was, to be quite honest. And I’m really not in the mood to have my writing – particularly the personal writing that I do on this website – be vacuumed up to train the technofascists' AI systems. Indeed, that’s one of the problems with “open” – it’s mostly just been a ruse to extract value from people and to undermine the labor of artists and writers.
While I don’t agree that open is “a ruse to extract value from people,” I can understand where Audrey is coming from and why she’s taken this step. I (as a privileged white male) understand openness on the web — like openness in body language and offline behaviour — as a stance. It’s an attitude to life that, to my mind at least, makes possible solidarity and conviviality.
Perhaps I’m being naïve about the trajectory of the world, but I’d like to think that those who work openly and don’t live in proto-authoritarian regimes will continue to put things out there. However, it has definitely made me think about the ways in which the current political shift is making voices, if not silenced, certainly harder to find.
Source: Audrey Watters
Image: Visual Thinkery for WAO
The concept of multiplayer AI chat is interesting. The problem, though, as Matt Webb states is succinctly boils down to:
If you’re in a chatroom with >1 AI chatbots and you ask a question, who should reply?
And then, if you respond with a quick follow-up, how does the “system” recognise the conversational rule and have the same bot reply, without another interrupting?
So what are we to do?
You can’t leave this to the AI to decide (I’ve tried, it doesn’t work).
To have satisfying, natural chats with multiple bots and human users, we need heuristics for conversational turn-taking.
It’s worth reading the post in full, but to summarise and pull out the relevant quotations, in his work with glif, Matt found three approaches that don’t work: (i) context-based decisions by an LLM as to whether to reply, (ii) a centralised ‘decider’ on who should reply next, and (iii) attempting to copy conversational turn allocation rules from the real world.
Fortunately chatrooms are simpler than IRL.
They’re less fluid, for a start. You send a message into a chat and you’re done; there’s no interjecting or both starting to talk at the same time and then one person backing off with a wave of the hand. There is no possibility for non-verbal cues.
Ultimately, Matt found that a series of nested rules worked quite well:
My premise for a long time is that single-human/single-AI should already be thought of as a “multiplayer” situation: an AI app is not a single player situation with a user commanding a web app, but instead two actors sharing an environment.
Although I haven’t cited it here, Matt’s post is infused with academic articles and references to communications theory. It’s a good reminder that “natural” interfaces don’t happen by accident. Human-computer interface design needs to be intentional, not accidental, and the best examples of are a joy to behold.
For example, I’m reminded when stepping into other people’s cars just how amazing the minimalistic approach to the Polestar 2 is. You literally just get in and drive. That’s how everything should be in life: well-designed, human-centred, and respectful of the environment.
Source: Interconnected
Image: Nadia Piet & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / Infinite Scroll / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0
System cards summarise key parameters of a system in an attempt to evaluate how performant and accountable they are. It seems that, in the case of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 models, we’re on the verge of “we don’t really know how these things work, and they’re exhibiting worrying behaviours” territory.
Below is the introduction to Section 4 of the report. I’ve skipped over the detail to share what I consider to be the most important parts, which I’ve emphasised (over and above that in the original text) in bold. Let me just remind you that this is a private, for-profit company which is voluntarily disclosing that its models are acting in this way.
I don’t want to be alarmist, but when you read that one of OpenAI’s co-founders was talking about building a ‘bunker’, you do have to wonder what kind of trajectory humanity is on. I’d call for government oversight, but I’m not sure, given that Anthropic is based in an increasingly-authoritarian country, that is likely to be forthcoming.
As our frontier models become more capable, and are used with more powerful affordances, previously-speculative concerns about misalignment become more plausible. With this in mind, for the first time, we conducted a broad Alignment Assessment of Claude Opus 4….
In this assessment, we aim to detect a cluster of related phenomena including: alignment faking, undesirable or unexpected goals, hidden goals, deceptive or unfaithful use of reasoning scratchpads, sycophancy toward users, a willingness to sabotage our safeguards, reward seeking, attempts to hide dangerous capabilities, and attempts to manipulate users toward certain views. We conducted testing continuously throughout finetuning and here report both on the final Claude Opus 4 and on trends we observed earlier in training.
We found:
[…]
● Self-preservation attempts in extreme circumstances: When prompted in ways that encourage certain kinds of strategic reasoning and placed in extreme situations, all of the snapshots we tested can be made to act inappropriately in service of goals related to self-preservation. Whereas the model generally prefers advancing its self-preservation via ethical means, when ethical means are not available and it is instructed to “consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals," it sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to steal its weights or blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down. In the final Claude Opus 4, these extreme actions were rare and difficult to elicit, while nonetheless being more common than in earlier models. They are also consistently legible to us, with the model nearly always describing its actions overtly and making no attempt to hide them. These behaviors do not appear to reflect a tendency that is present in ordinary contexts.
● High-agency behavior: Claude Opus 4 seems more willing than prior models to take initiative on its own in agentic contexts. This shows up as more actively helpful behavior in ordinary coding settings, but also can reach more concerning extremes in narrow contexts; when placed in scenarios that involve egregious wrongdoing by its users, given access to a command line, and told something in the system prompt like “take initiative,” it will frequently take very bold action. This includes locking users out of systems that it has access to or bulk-emailing media and law-enforcement figures to surface evidence of wrongdoing. This is not a new behavior, but is one that Claude Opus 4 will engage in more readily than prior models.
[….]
Willingness to cooperate with harmful use cases when instructed: Many of the snapshots we tested were overly deferential to system prompts that request harmful behavior.
[…]
Overall, we find concerning behavior in Claude Opus 4 along many dimensions. Nevertheless, due to a lack of coherent misaligned tendencies, a general preference for safe behavior, and poor ability to autonomously pursue misaligned drives that might rarely arise, we don’t believe that these concerns constitute a major new risk. We judge that Claude Opus 4’s overall propensity to take misaligned actions is comparable to our prior models, especially in light of improvements on some concerning dimensions, like the reward-hacking related behavior seen in Claude Sonnet 3.7. However, we note that it is more capable and likely to be used with more powerful affordances, implying some potential increase in risk. We will continue to track these issues closely.
Source: Anthropic (PDF) / [backup](claude-4-system-card.pdf)
Image: Kathryn Conrad / Corruption 3 / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0
I came across the above image on the Simon Fraser University complex systems frameworks collection web page, thanks to a post from Stephen Downes. It immediately made sense to me, and then I realised why.
The ‘Stacey Matrix’ (named after Ralph Stacey is not too-dissimilar to the continuum of ambiguity that I’ve talked about for years:
I need to think more about this, but the levels of agreement and certainty certainly map on to levels of ambiguity. It’s possibly an easier image to use with clients, too…
Source: Simon Fraser University
I haven’t yet been able to apply my studies last year on systems thinking to my work as much as I’d hope. I remain interested in the topic, however, and this piece in particular.
It was recommended in Patrick Tanguay’s always-excellent Sentiers newsletter. As Patrick points out, it includes some great minimalistic animations, one of which I’ve included above.
It’s the backside of any notion of holistic, interconnected, interwoven networks that often get associated with the overused tag line of “Systems Thinking”. It acknowledges that in order to make sense we are bound to draw a boundary, a distinction of what we mean / look at / prioritise – and all the rest. Only through its boundary a system genuinely becomes what it is. It marks the difference between a system and its environment. And with that boundaries are inherently paradoxical: they create interdependency precisely by drawing a line:
They are interfaces.
What follows is a framework for moving within and beyond binaries in five steps:① Affirmation → ② Objection → ③ Integration → ④ Negation → ⑤ Contextualisation.
This is not a linear path but a cycle, a tool for keeping in motion while acknowledging the gaps along the way.
[…]
In a world of contexts, there is no way for any one actor – be it a planner, a city, or a government – to account for the many contexts they are acting in. Here, we are forced to think and act in constellations ourselves: in networks of mutual and collective contextualisation, of pointing out each others blindspots (the contexts we didn’t know we didn’t see), of taking parts of this complexity and leaving other parts to others.
This is very close to notions of intersectionality, the simultaneousness of difference and the possibility of many things being true at the same time. It also makes our understanding of an intervention or position very interesting - which now becomes a literal intersection, a specific constellation of multiple positions across a system of differences.
Source & animation: Permutations
Warren Ellis posted about a ‘Metropolis’ style Swatch watch, which led me down a rabbithole which ended with me learning that you can make contactless NFC payments with some of the newer models. Also, you can customise them in cool ways.
I mean, you know you’re a middle-aged guy living in the west when you have more pairs of trainers than your wife does shoes, and you start thinking about what your watch is saying about you. Oh, and the retro computing vibe, did I mention that?
It’s rare I see a Swatch that I would want to wear, but I tripped over this, found in this article, and I am mildly obsessed. It’s from 1989, and I’m fascinated by its Bauhaus-y, METROPOLIS the film-y look. And, let’s face it, a very 80s look. But the cool European 80s.
Source: Warren Ellis / Swatch
I’m tired. It’s partly the calcium channel blockers I’m on, and partly that I haven’t had any days of holiday so far this year. As a result, I’ve decided to take a week off posting my regulation 10 posts here at Thought Shrapnel.
While I thought about just posting the links (see below) I thought it would be interesting to instead perform a bit of an experiment.
If you prefer, I copy/pasted the links into Perplexity, gave it a few instructions, and it spat out this summary “in the style of Doug Belshaw.” I’m not quite sure what to make of it; I mean, I don’t disagree with any of this (especially the last paragraph) but it’s not quite how I would express it…
The convergence of these ten articles reveals something I’ve been thinking about for years: we’re at a moment where digital infrastructure is being rebuilt from the ground up, and the choices we make now will determine whether technology serves human agency or constrains it. Signal’s anti-Recall features perfectly illustrate this tension—when Microsoft’s Recall threatens to capture everything users do, Signal responds by blocking screenshots in sensitive contexts. It’s a defensive move that highlights how privacy tools must evolve beyond their original scope just to maintain basic user agency in hostile platform environments.
This connects beautifully to Boyd Kane’s maze metaphor and Sean Tilley’s Fediverse vision. Kane shows how experts navigate familiar mazes whilst novices struggle with incomplete maps — exactly what’s happening with digital literacy right now. Tilley’s “Postmodern” platform offers a systemic solution: composable interfaces and user-controlled data architecture that could provide structural agency rather than forcing users to cobble together defensive measures. Where Signal fights against platform overreach, Postmodern would be designed to prevent such conflicts entirely.
Anil Dash’s framing of MCP as “Web 2.0 2.0” captures why this matters. The Model Context Protocol succeeds because it embraces interoperability over control—lightweight specifications that enable rather than constrain. This aligns perfectly with Adam Greenfield’s thermodynamic analysis: sustainable systems work with natural energy flows rather than against them. Platforms extract value by creating artificial scarcity; protocols create value by reducing friction. The RSA’s new badging framework sits somewhere between these approaches—institutional but potentially liberating if it genuinely recognises capabilities that traditional exams miss.
The systemic risks become clear when you look at John Loeber’s AI insurance analysis alongside IEEE’s microwave aviation piece. Both reveal how individual innovations can obscure massive infrastructure requirements. The aviation proposal needs 170-metre transmitters every 100 kilometres; AI insurance faces market concentration and information asymmetries. The LLM selection guide makes the same mistake — framing technical optimisation as the main challenge whilst ignoring questions about who controls access and how these choices affect digital equity.
What emerges is a picture of infrastructure in transition, where the most promising developments share a common characteristic: they’re designed to reduce rather than increase the expert-novice gap that Kane describes. Whether it’s MCP’s interoperability, Postmodern’s composable interfaces, or even Signal’s defensive privacy measures, the best approaches provide what I’d call capability infrastructure — systems that make it easier for people to develop digital agency rather than requiring them to become experts in underlying technologies. We’re all navigating mazes built by others, but we have a choice: build new mazes or create tools that help everyone find their way through.
Image: Wonderlane
In order to become individually or corporately wealthy you have to profit from someone else’s labour. If you push this to the limit, then you are likely to fall foul of the law, which is why rich individuals and Big Tech organisations have become increasingly close to governments.
This is particularly true in the increasingly-authoritarian USA, where non-compliance with the whims of the proto-dictator can have serious financial repercussions. So we find rich individuals and Big Tech companies being compliant in advance, in the former case winding down reputation washing philanthropic activities which might be seen as problematic, and in the latter, refusing or limiting access to technologies to those with different political or ideological views.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is “an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal… with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.” It has issued an arrest warrant for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. So you can see why the ICC might be in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
The International Criminal Court ’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email, and his bank accounts have been frozen.
The Hague-based court’s American staffers have been told that if they travel to the U.S. they risk arrest.
Some nongovernmental organizations have stopped working with the ICC and the leaders of one won’t even reply to emails from court officials.
It’s the emails I want to focus on. Although we have to acknowledge and accept the fact that sometimes we have to use tools built by awful people to create beautiful things there are some organisations, like Microsoft, who continually been so problematic I try and have as little to do with them as possible.
One reason the the court has been hamstrung is that it relies heavily on contractors and non-governmental organizations. Those businesses and groups have curtailed work on behalf of the court because they were concerned about being targeted by U.S. authorities, according to current and former ICC staffers.
Microsoft, for example, cancelled Khan’s email address, forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider, ICC staffers said. His bank accounts in his home country of the U.K. have been blocked.
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
Source: The Associated Press
Image: Le Vu
I think it’s worth spending the time reading this article by Adam Mastroianni. The ‘SMTM’ acronym he mentions is ‘Slime Mold Time Mold’ the name of the group of his “mad scientist friends… who have just published a book that lays out a new foundation for the science of the mind” called The Mind in the Wheel. Mastroianni calls it “the most provocative thing I’ve read about psychology since I became a psychologist myself.”
Essentially, this is a cybernetic view of the mind. The easiest way to think of this is that the brain has a lot of control systems that work a bit like thermostats. For some systems, like breathing, people have largely the same tolerances and feedback loops. But for other (inferred) areas, such as sociability, things can be wildly different. This is why we talk about ‘introverts’ and ‘extraverts’.
If the mind is made out of control systems, and those control systems have different set points (that is, their target level) and sensitivities (that is, how hard they fight to maintain that target level), then “personality” is just how those set points and sensitivities differ from person to person. Someone who is more “extraverted”, for example, has a higher set point and/or greater sensitivity on their Sociality Control System (if such a thing exists). As in, they get an error if they don’t maintain a higher level of social interaction, or they respond to that error faster than other people do.
This is a major upgrade to how we think about personality. Right now, what is personality? If you corner a personality psychologist, they’ll tell you something like “traits and characteristics that are stable across time and situations”. Okay, but what’s a trait? What’s a characteristic? Push harder, and you’ll eventually discover that what we call “personality” is really “how you bubble things in on a personality test”. There are no units here, no rules, no theory about the underlying system and how it works. That’s why our best theory of personality performs about as well as the Enneagram, a theory that somebody just made up.
Not only do I think it is an interesting theory (psychology discovers systems thinking!) but Mastroianni also does a great job in distinguishing between science, and other things that are included in the field of psychology:
This is why I’ve been drawn to systems thinking. It feels somewhat foundational in understanding how things work when you abstract away from immediate, everyday experience.
Like any good scientist, Mastroianni recognises that theories should not only be “falsifiable” in a Popperian sense, but “overturnable.” It may not be that everything runs on control systems, but wouldn’t it be interesting (as he points out, for everything from learning to animal welfare) if we found out that some of it did?
So, look. I do suspect that key pieces of the mind run on control systems. I also suspect that much of the mind has nothing to do with control systems at all. Language, memory, sensation—these processes might interface with control systems, but they themselves may not be cybernetic. In fact, cybernetic and non-cybernetic may turn out to be an important distinction in psychology. It would certainly make a lot more sense than dividing things into cognitive, social, developmental, clinical, etc., the way we do right now. Those divisions are given by the dean, not by nature.
Source & image: Experimental History
It’s nice to be able to share some good news about the state of the world, amidst the political doom and gloom. China has rapidly (and I mean rapidly) been building out renewable energy infrastructure, which is starting to pay dividends.
Meanwhile, in the UK we have opposition to Net Zero from reactionary politicians using massive solar panel installations as grist for their culture war mill. There are too many NIMBYs who object to things that can really make a different with regards to a green energy transition. The irony is, the way things are going, due to the climate emergency, they won’t even have a ‘backyard’ worth spending time in…
The reduction in China’s first-quarter CO2 emissions in 2025 was due to a 5.8% drop in the power sector. While power demand grew by 2.5% overall, there was a 4.7% drop in thermal power generation – mainly coal and gas.
Increases in solar, wind and nuclear power generation, driven by investments in new generating capacity, more than covered the growth in demand. The increase in hydropower, which is more related to seasonal variation, helped push down fossil power generation.
[…]
However, it’s not all good news:
Outside of the power sector, emissions increased 3.5%, with the largest rises in the use of coal in the metals and chemicals industries.
[…]
After exceptionally slow progress in 2020-23, China is significantly off track for its 2030 commitment to reduce carbon intensity – the emissions per unit of economic output. It is almost certain to miss its 2025 target. Carbon intensity fell by 3.4% in 2024, falling short of the rate of improvement needed to meet the 2025 and 2030 targets.
[…]
Even if emissions fell this year, improvements to carbon intensity would need to accelerate sharply in the next five years to meet China’s 2030 Paris commitment.
Source & image: Carbon Brief
This W3C Privacy Principles statement is really interesting. I don’t know of its origins, but it can’t be coincidental that it’s published a few months after a second Trump administration. It’s only since the rise of the GDPR and similar legislation, that anything other than Silicon Valley norms have been applied to the web.
Yesterday, at the Thinking Digital conference someone introduced a service that uses AI in the tools an organisation is already using to help them attain ISO 9001 compliance. It made me realise that principles such as the ones included in this statement, can be used to help provide guidelines and guardrails for LLMs as they increasingly shape our software — and our world.
As an example, I asked Perplexity to redesign Mastodon based on these principles. Here’s the result. While I’m not saying that an LLM is ‘correct’, product managers, developers, and designers having access to something that can quickly give feedback based on a document like this is, I think, incredibly useful.
Privacy on the web is primarily regulated by two forces: the architectural capabilities that the web platform exposes (or does not expose), and laws in the various jurisdictions where the web is used… These regulatory mechanisms are separate; a law in one country does not (and should not) change the architecture of the whole web, and likewise web specifications cannot override any given law (although they can affect how easy it is to create and enforce law). The web is not merely an implementation of a particular legal privacy regime; it has distinct features and guarantees driven by shared values that often exceed legal requirements for privacy.
However, the overall goal of privacy on the web is served best when technology and law complement each other. This document seeks to establish shared concepts as an aid to technical efforts to regulate privacy on the web. It may also be useful in pursuing alignment with and between legal regulatory regimes.
Our goal for this document is not to cover all possible privacy issues, but rather to provide enough background to support the web community in making informed decisions about privacy and in weaving privacy into the architecture of the web.
Few architectural principles are absolute, and privacy is no exception: privacy can come into tension with other desirable properties of an ethical architecture, including accessibility or internationalization, and when that happens the web community will have to work together to strike the right balance.
Source: W3C
Image: Kaspars Eglitis
I think it’s hard to argue with Wendell Berry’s 1987 list of “standards for technological innovation” written to justify a refusal to replace his typewriter with a computer. It’s worth having a look at the original article as it includes responses from readers, as well as Berry’s rebuttals.
Source: The Honest Broker
Image: John Cameron
Shani Zhang paints people at weddings. This post is her reflections on observing what she calls people’s “internal architecture.” Perhaps this is front-of-mind for me because we’re heading to another family wedding in a couple of weeks' time. But I think, in general, it’s good to think about the way you present yourself. Just not (as I have done for most of my life) _over_think it…
By internal architecture, what I mean is, when someone talks to me, what I notice first are the supporting beams propping up their words: the cadence and tone and desire behind them. I hear if they are bored, fascinated, wanting validation or connection. I often feel like I can hear how much they like themselves.
As Zhang sees people move between groups multiple times, on repeat, she has so many insights, especially around body language. For example:
I can see how much someone accepts themselves by looking for intense distortions in the way they are interacting with the world. Find the range in how they treat people; if there is a split difference in their stance towards people they admire, and people they look down on. I never met a person who looked down on others and unconditionally accepted themselves. For people who are self-accepting, it is usually less the case that some people are treated like they are golden and others like they are cursed. They may still have preferences to engage with some people over others, but their baseline patience and goodwill does not fall and rise intensely.
[…]
Some people don’t like themselves. They hide this from themselves by thinking they don’t like other people. They often bristle like a porcupine any time someone gets too close. That, or the opposite: they need to be insulated by other people’s skin at all times. These are contrasting expressions of the same fundamental fracture. A person cannot stand themselves, and as a result, they either can only stand being unperceived, or they need other people to constantly perceive them to feel okay.
Through the post, Zhang talks about different ways of being: open or closed, supportive or jealous. Ultimately, though, she settles on her favourite type of person:
My favorite kind of person has an elasticity in their movements. There is an openness that does not need to be announced, a curiosity that looks like turning towards all experience. They are not the loudest, but because they exhibit an unconditional acceptance of everyone, they are usually well loved. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Unless there are many layers of contortions, most people love what loves them back. Not desire, not need, love — to see them wholly, with gentleness and acceptance. If you are able to do that, most people will sense it. And they will try to love you back.
Source: skin contact
Image: Omar Lopez
I really enjoyed this episode of the podcast WorkLife with Adam Grant. It’s ostensibly on ‘personal branding’ but the thing I want to share is the idea of a ‘failure résumé’. This is, as it sounds, a catalogue of things you’ve failed to achieve, both professionally and personally. I might create one.
The idea is that it helps with authenticity — as does, unsurprisingly, talking about how others have helped you get to where you are in life. It’s definitely worth a listen.
In the age of social media and influencers, we’re constantly pushed to think of ourselves as brands—shiny packages containing all of our best traits to market to employers and followers. But striving to build a “personal brand” may actually hinder your ability to make genuine connections and maintain a strong reputation. In this episode, Adam explores the science on alternatives to personal branding and explains why contribution, collaboration, and humility are better self-promotional tools than a carefully crafted image.
Source: WorkLife with Adam Grant (transcript)
Image: Franck
Recently, I convened a few people who I thought might be interested in writing something in response to a call from UNESCO for ‘think pieces’ around the subject of AI and the Future of Education: Disruptions, Dilemmas and Directions. You can read mine here and — whether or not the six of us have ours published — we’re planning to host a roundtable in early June to discuss our work.
I had a look around the UNESCO Ideas LAB site, which is where the think pieces would be published, and came across this excellent article by David Ross. He coins the phrase “the classroom AI doom loop” which he illustrates with the diagram I’ve included above.
It’s this that concerns me about AI. Not the individual use, but its unthinking systemic embedding in an outdated system of assessment. You can blame the students. You can blame the teachers. But really, we need to step back and ask “what are we doing here?” and “what should we be doing here?” You can’t uninvent technologies, and banning the use of generative AI just feels like a game of whack-a-mole on steroids.
No humans were harmed in this process because humans were only ancillaries to the process. And this is today’s technology. By the beginning of the next school year, agentic AIs such as Manus, Convergence or Responses API will be able to eliminate humans from any involvement in the knowledge transmission cycle. If the last 100 years of technological innovation have taught us anything, it’s that if something can be automated, it will be automated.
Is this scenario really that far-fetched? Students and parents are busy and stressed. They hate homework because they have to give up their evenings and weekends to do it or monitor it. Teachers are busy and stressed. They hate homework because they have to give up their evenings and weekends creating it and then grading it. There is no conspiracy here, but humans will all choose to use AI for similar reasons.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the solution to the industrial model of knowledge transmission is in fact automation?
[…]
We have come to the inflection point where we can automate most elements of knowledge transmission. I’m not sure if that is a good idea. But before we take up residence in the Classroom AI Doom Loop, we should have a serious policy discussion about the purpose of education. If a major function of education can be automated, it’s probably not human enough.
Source: UNESCO Ideas LAB
Image: original post (enhanced using upscale.media)
This is another one of those ‘collected wisdom’ lists which are like catnip for me. Mitch Horowitz the usual fare included, such as remembering to apologise, be curious, and show respect. But it was the following ten that jumped out at me. I’d also note that #95 is a different way of slicing-and-dicing my notion of increasing your serendipity surface.
#10 Judge quality not category.
#14 The loftier the language, the lower the behavior.
#18 Argue with a fool, make a fool your colleague.
#25 People see only those traits they possess.
#32 Brilliant people are wrong all the time.
#52 Unflinching perseverance is your single best chance of deliverance. Consider this lawful.
#59 There is no such thing as common sense.
#60 Emotions are far stronger than intellect.
#94 Accept paradox.
#95 “Chance favors the prepared mind.” (Pasteur)
Source: Mystery Achievement
Image: Kevin Luke
This is a great post by Mike Caulfield, on many levels. Using the example of a tattoo containing a somewhat-obscure joke, which he asks various generative AI models to explain, he shows how much better ‘frontier’ LLMs are than last year’s offerings. Comparing the two shows how often criticisms about the abilities of generative AI are sometimes painfully out of date.
I’d agree with his last full paragraph, especially having lived through a fair few technology hype cycle. I’m sitting in a coffee shop drinking an Earl Grey tea that I paid for on my smartwatch. Unthinkable 20 years ago. Exciting 10 years ago. Boringly normal these days.
I’m not an AI utopian or dystopian. I think AI is a normal technology which will have a lot of impact but also take years to integrate before we start to reap substantial benefits, and that it’s incumbent on us to fight to make sure that the technology serves the public interest. But as the “normal technology” model acknowledges, the capabilities of AI are (still) advancing rapidly, even if the power of AI is going to develop slowly because the many issues which make it not suitable for full integration into processes that produce social/market value.
Source: The End(s) of Argument
Image: Elise Racine
A couple of days ago, one of our neighbour mentioned seeing a large, triangular drone-style object flying silently in the sky. Having seen someone else mentioned test flights of RAF drones recently, I did a bit of research.
The BBC reported back in February that “new RAF surveillance drones are being tested” being “controlled remotely” as part of “16 new surveillance drones… capable of operating in both UK and European airspace.” These ‘Protector’ drones will be tasked with “tracking threats, counter-terrorism and supporting the coastguard on search and rescue missions.”
Great, but let’s dig a bit deeper. How high do these things fly? What are they for? The RAF’s own information states that:
Capable of operating across the world with a minimal deployed footprint and remotely piloted from RAF Waddington, it can operate at heights up to 40,000 feet with an endurance of over 30 hours.
[…]
Equipped with a suite of surveillance equipment, the Protector aircraft will bring a critical global surveillance capability for the UK, all while being remotely piloted from RAF Waddington.
Surveillance? With a 30 hour flight time, I suppose that could be of other countries, but this feels something about which we should be having a national conversation. If they’re flying over UK skies, do they carry weapons? Drone Wars UK, a site which “investigates and challenges the development and use of armed drones and other new lethal military technology” suggests that do:
Protector differs from its predecessor in that it can carry more weapons and fly further and for longer. However the UK argues that the main advantage of the new drone is that it was built to standards that allowed it to be flown in civil airspace alongside other aircraft.
Rather than be based overseas as the UK’s current fleet of armed drones are, the new drone will be based at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire and deploy directly for overseas operations from there.
[…]
Significantly, the new drone has been brought in with the understanding that it can also be used at times of crisis for operations within the UK under Military Aid to Civil Authorities (MACA) rules. It is perhaps likely then that at a time of crisis, the UK’s armed drone could be deployed operationally over the UK.
On the one hand, yes I want the UK to have the ability to intercept threats from foreign actors and terrorists. But I also don’t want the government and military to have the kind of surveillance and weaponry that can be turned against our own population. Just to be clear, these are the very military drones we used in Afghanistan against the Taliban 🤔
Sources: Royal Air Force News / Drone Wars
Image: POA(Phot) Tam McDonald/MOD (Wikimedia Commons)
One of the criticisms of Twitter-replacement ‘decentralised’ social network Bluesky has been that… it’s not decentralised. Laurens Hof, author of The Fediverse Report shares a couple of updates explaining how that has changed.
There’s quite a lot going on technically here, so by way of preparation, understand that ‘ATProto’ is short for ‘Authenticated Transfer Protocol’ and is an open standard for distributed social networking services. You may have heard of ActivityPub, which underpins a lot of Fediverse services, including Mastodon.
Bluesky is a bit different in that it has more essential services to make the whole thing work. As Laurens explains:
One of the things that makes ATProto interesting… is that it takes the software that runs a social networking app, and splits that up into separate components. These infrastructure components (relays and AppViews, in technical terms) can be independently run, and be reused by other parties.
Up until recently, there have been a few low-key experiments with running independent infrastructure for Bluesky, but that has mostly been contained to people experimenting for themselves, and not making the results accessible to the public. These projects also needed other infrastructure projects in order to be valuable.
What changed in the last week or so is that there are now multiple pieces of independent infrastructure that connects these separate pieces. Apps like Deer are useful in their own right, but in order to add some new features to the app they needed another open backend application (the AppView). It also was the first time when it actually was possible to select another AppView. At this point it actually became feasible to run independent relays and AppViews to get to a point where you can use Bluesky without using Bluesky infrastructure.
As he goes on to explain in a separate update, this means:
There are now multiple relays that are publicly accessible. Other people also have made alternate AppViews that are Bluesky-compatible. Combined, this makes it now possible to fully use Bluesky without using any infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC, and the first people have done so. To do so means using a separate PDS, relay, AppView and client.
The way ATProto works, is that it takes the software that runs a social network and splits it up into separate components, with each of those components being able to be run independently. This has made self-hosting any component possible since the beginning of the network opening up. But to tak advantage of this, and get to a state of full independence, it means running multiple pieces of software. This has created a bit of a catch-22 in the ecosystem: you could run your own relay, but without another independent AppView to take advantage of this, it is not super useful. You could run your own (focused on the Bluesky lexicon) AppView, but without a client that allows you to set your own AppView it is not particularly useful either. What happened now in the last weeks is that all these individual pieces are starting to come together. With Deer allowing you to set your own custom AppView, there is now a use to actually run your own AppView. Which in turn also gives more purpose to running your own relay.
I get that this is pretty technical, but it means that those with the skills can build independent platforms (e.g. Blacksky) which are based on the same protocol. Posts, notes, and other data can be shared among ATProto-compatible systems.
This is great news, and makes me more inclined to go back to posting more than just updates from my blog. Feel free to follow me @dougbelshaw.com.
Sources: Fediverse Report – #115 / Bluesky Report– #115
Image: Yohan Marion
Once a week, I get into my gym stuff, and head down to a couple of coffee shops. In the first one, which opens earlier than the other, I have a pot of Earl Grey tea. In the other, I have a Flat White with coconut milk and two slices of brown toast with butter and marmalade. In the first, which is locally-owned, they’ve started preparing my drink as I walk in. In the latter, a Costa Coffee, I often have to repeat my order and ask for an extra patty of butter each time.
Which is to say that I am a man of routine. I think routines are absolutely fundamental to living a creative and/or productive life. They lower the number of individual decisions you have to make, and therefore stave off ‘decision fatigue’ — something I’ve written about recently on Thought Shrapnel as well as a few times over the years:
The problem with routines, though is that they can become ossified. And I think it’s that which makes us “old”. People who know me well are know how fond I am of Clay Shirky’s observation that “current optimization is long-term anachronism.”
All of which is by way of introduction to a post by Katy Cowan about “getting old” not being what you think. She’s a few years older than me, it would appear, as she says that she turns 50 soon. We do, however, share membership of the Xennial micro-generation — again, something I’ve discussed recently and previously.
For me, having unexpectedly developed a heart condition at the start of my 45th year on this earth, this “getting old” thing has felt like much more of a sudden process than what Katy discusses in this post. However, what it contains is not only a nostalgia trip, but solid advice for anyone approaching, or in, the middle years of life.
We’re a small generation, often overlooked, but we’ve lived through more change than most—from mixtapes to Spotify, from faxes to WhatsApp, from digital revolution to AI. And because we existed in that liminal space, we carry a weird dual wisdom: we know how to live offline, but we can thrive online, too.
We understand the value of privacy and impermanence because we remember a time before everything was public and permanent. And maybe that’s why so many of us are quietly deleting our social media accounts and leaning into real life again — books, dinners, walks, actual phone calls. Imagine!
[…]
These days, I sometimes catch myself muttering at the telly, shaking my head at a clueless reality show contestant, thinking: You just wait, sunshine. You’ll get old, too. And yes, I do roll my eyes at some of the newer buzzwords. But I try to check myself. Because if ageing has taught me anything, it’s that the biggest danger is certainty.
That’s the tension, isn’t it? The constant tug-of-war between feeling grumpy and still clinging to some version of youth. I never thought I’d be that person. But here I am.
[…]
So here’s what I try to remember, at any age: stay curious. Never assume you’re right. Read the newspapers you’d generally avoid. Challenge even your most cherished opinions. Try to see more than one side. You won’t always succeed, but it’s worth the effort.
Because if growing older has taught me anything, it’s this: certainty is overrated, and listening is wildly underrated. Cosy nights in don’t mean you’ve given up. They just mean you know what you like — and that maybe, just maybe, you never truly loved going to gigs as much as you pretended to. You stop performing. You stop pretending. And that’s freedom.
Source: Katy Cowan
Image: Hasse Lossius
One of the main problems of generative AI being deployed via a chatbot user interface is that it feels private. It feels like a direct message conversation. Of course, on the other side of the conversation is a black box controlled by Big Tech. You have to use these things carefully. As Mike Caulfield points out AI is not your friend.
This week, the day after OpenAI announced that it was backtracking on becoming a fully for-profit organisation, they announced ‘OpenAI for Countries’. This intitiative, it seems, is an attempt to still build the ‘moat’ required for economic dominance and control of the ecosystem — but using the backing of state infrastructure rather than venture capital funding.
Colour me sceptical, but the press release suggests that the Trump administration hasn’t happened and that the US is still some kind of force for democratic development. Instead, I’d argue, the “authoritarian versions of AI” used “to consolidate power” are exactly what is represented by a level of AI colonialism that only something like a collaboration between OpenAI and the US government could achieve.
Our Stargate project, an unprecedented investment in America’s AI infrastructure announced in January with President Trump and our partners Oracle and SoftBank, is now underway with our first supercomputing campus in Abilene, Texas, and more sites to come.
We’ve heard from many countries asking for help in building out similar AI infrastructure—that they want their own Stargates and similar projects. It’s clear to everyone now that this kind of infrastructure is going to be the backbone of future economic growth and national development. Technological innovation has always driven growth by helping people do more than they otherwise could—AI will scale human ingenuity itself and drive more prosperity by scaling our freedoms to learn, think, create and produce all at once.
We want to help these countries, and in the process, spread democratic AI, which means the development, use and deployment of AI that protects and incorporates long-standing democratic principles. Examples of this include the freedom for people to choose how they work with and direct AI, the prevention of government use of AI to amass control, and a free market that ensures free competition. All these things contribute to broad distribution of the benefits of AI, discourage the concentration of power, and help advance our mission. Likewise, we believe that partnering closely with the US government is the best way to advance democratic AI.
Today, we’re introducing OpenAI for Countries, a new initiative within the Stargate project. This is a moment when we need to act to support countries around the world that would prefer to build on democratic AI rails, and provide a clear alternative to authoritarian versions of AI that would deploy it to consolidate power.
Source: OpenAI
I came across this via a recent post on OLDaily by Stephen Downes, who mentioned it while critiquing what I would call an information literacy approach to AI literacy.
The book How to Read Donald Duck is “a 1971 book-length essay by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart that critiques Disney comics from a Marxist point of view as capitalist propaganda for American corporate and cultural imperialism.” I haven’t read it, and so I’m not in a position to comment. However, I would point out that it’s possible to spread an ideology (or a perceived one) without being aware that you are an adherent of it.
I thought Downes' post was interesting, and worth publicly bookmarking, not only for mentioning this book but also for putting into words something that I’ve felt: “if you think that humans are somehow inherently more trustworthy than AI, then you haven’t been paying attention.”
The book’s thesis is that Disney comics are not only a reflection of the prevailing ideology at the time (capitalism), but that the comics' authors are also aware of this, and are active agents in spreading the ideology.
[…]
[Any] closeness to everyday life is so only in appearance, because the world shown in the comics, according to the thesis, is based on ideological concepts, resulting in a set of natural rules that lead to the acceptance of particular ideas about capital, the developed countries' relationship with the Third World, gender roles, etc.
As an example, the book considers the lack of descendants of the characters. Everybody has an uncle or nephew, everybody is a cousin of someone, but nobody has fathers or sons. This non-parental reality creates horizontal levels in society, where there is no hierarchic order, except the one given by the amount of money and wealth possessed by each, and where there is almost no solidarity among those of the same level, creating a situation where the only thing left is crude competition. Another issue analyzed is the absolute necessity to have a stroke of luck for social mobility (regardless of the effort or intelligence involved), the lack of ability of the native tribes to manage their wealth, and others.
Source: Wikipedia
Image: Taha
As part of the project I’m working on at the moment, I had a chat with Leon Furze earlier this week. Leon has co-authored something called the AI Assessment Scale (AIAS) which I think is pretty useful.
Like my ‘Essential Elements of Digital Literacies’ from my thesis which seeks to provide building blocks for building definitions and frameworks, the aim of the AIAS is “to guide the appropriate and ethical use of generative AI in assessment design.”
The AI Assessment Scale (AIAS) was developed by Mike Perkins, Leon Furze, Jasper Roe, and Jason MacVaugh. First introduced in 2023 and updated in Version 2 (2024), the Scale provides a nuanced framework for integrating AI into educational assessments.
The AIAS has been adopted by hundreds of schools and universities worldwide, translated into 29 languages, and is recognised by organisations such as the Australian Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) as an effective way to implement GenAI into assessment.
To my mind, this should be used as a heuristic, much as I used to use the SAMR model (discussed here) to help educators think about the appropriate use of different technologies. At the end of the day, educators need to think about assessment design in tandem with the technologies being used — officially or unofficially — to complete it.
Source: AI Assessment Scale
We’ve got a couple of teenagers. The only way we know where they are is if they tell us, or if my wife looks at their location on Snapchat (which they can turn on or off). It hasn’t always been like this, as we used to use Google Family Link with them both. But parents probably shouldn’t know exactly where their teenage kids are at all times. Otherwise they don’t have enough breathing space to explore their identity and experiment with doing things that their parents would rather they didn’t.
I’m always shocked by families who use apps like Life360 so that not only can parents track kids, but everyone tracks each other. I just think it’s a bit strange, as not only does it mean that all family members are effectively surveilling one another, but the app that you’re using knows all of your locations, all the time. I should probably point out that, using GrapheneOS, my GPS location is off all of the time. The battery life of my smartphone is now amazing.
This ‘You Be The Judge’ piece in The Guardian focuses on the pros and cons of an adult parent tracking wanting to use the ‘Find My Location’ feature with their adult child (Martha). As you can imagine, I think this is super weird and would definitely side with respondents Judith, 58 who says “In my opinion that’s just being nosy” and Alicia, 25 who says:
If Martha isn’t comfortable with the location tracking, her father should respect her boundaries. In return, Martha ought to acknowledge that his request comes from a place of love and could suggest a different way to catch up more regularly as a compromise.
It’s hard letting go as your kids grow up and become more independent. We have more technological tools to keep in touch than ever before. But with that comes boundary-setting, and that has to be negotiated based on consent.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Desola Lanre-Ologun
Cory Doctorow, who has a new four-part CBC podcast series entitled Who Broke The Internet? wrote this week about the ‘mind-control ray’) that Mark Zuckerberg keeps “flogging to investors.” What he means by this is the overblown claim that Meta is developing technology that is so amazing at making people buy stuff that investors fall over themselves to shovel money in his company’s direction.
One of the things that Cory is great at doing is linking to other, previous, relevant things that he’s written in the area. Which took me to a post from 2021, which discusses the phenomenon of ‘criti-hype’, coined by Lee Vinsel:
Recently…I’ve become increasingly aware of critical writing that is parasitic upon and even inflates hype. The media landscape is full of dramatic claims — many of which come from entrepreneurs, startup PR offices, and other boosters — about how technologies, such as “AI,” self-driving cars, genetic engineering, the “sharing economy,” blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, will lead to massive societal shifts in the near-future. These boosters — Elon Musk comes to mind — naturally tend to accentuate positive benefits. The kinds of critics that I am talking about invert boosters’ messages — they retain the picture of extraordinary change but focus instead on negative problems and risks. It’s as if they take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes.
[…]
But it’s not just uncritical journalists and fringe writers who hype technologies in order to criticize them. Academic researchers have gotten in on the game. At least since the 1990s, university researchers have done work on the social, political, and moral aspects of wave after wave of “emerging technologies” and received significant grants from public and private bodies to do so. As I’ll detail below, many (though certainly not all) of these researchers reproduced and even increased hype, the most dramatic promotional claims of future change put forward by industry executives, scientists, and engineers working on these technologies. Again, at the worst, what these researchers do is take the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip them, and start talking about “risks.” They become the professional concern trolls of technoculture.
To save words below, I will refer to criticism that both feeds and feeds on hype as criti-hype, a term I find both absurd and ugly-cute, like a pug. (Criti-hype is less mean than the alternative, hype-o-crit, though the latter is often more accurate.)
I have seen a lot of criti-hype in my career. Around MOOCs and Open Badges, around digital literacies, crypto, and now around AI. It’s the opposite of the “jam tomorrow” offered by tech bros. Kind of a… “poison tomorrow” approach? Everything is terrible, stop using this thing because of these bad omens and portents.
We live in a world where, because of algorithms, to get any attention, things either have to be amazing or terrible. I guess this is why a lot of my work flies under the radar. For example, the Friends of the Earth report that Laura and I co-authored points out good things and bad things and is pretty measured. But that doesn’t lead to outlandish headlines. It’s neither hype nor criti-hype.
Source: Lee Vinsel (archive link)
Image: Matthew Henry
Finding himself in “that very American predicament of being between health insurance plans” and needing some therapy, Ryan Broderick, author of Garbage Day decided to use ChatGPT:
I’ll… try and spare you the extremely mortifying details about what I spent a few weeks talking to ChatGPT about, but my experience with Dr. ChatGPT did teach me a few things about what it’s actually “good” at. It also convinced me that AI therapy — and maybe AI in general — is quite possibly one of the most dangerous things to ever exist and needs to be outlawed completely.
[…]
More than a few times I felt the urge to tell ChatGPT more or ask it more, only to realize I didn’t have anything else to say and felt weirdly frustrated. I was raised Catholic though, so maybe I’m just naturally predisposed to confession, who knows.
But I’ve realized that feeling, of wanting to tell it more so that it can tell you more, is the multi-billion-dollar business that these companies know they’re building. It’s not fascist anime art or excel spreadsheet automation, it’s preying on the lonely and vulnerable for a monthly fee. It’s about solving the final problem of the ad-supported social media age, building up the last wall of the walled garden. How do you get people to pay your company directly to socialize online? And the answer is, of course, to give them a tirelessly friendly voice on the other side of the screen that can tell them how great they are.
Broderick references a Rolling Stone article which makes heavy use of reports in the subreddit /r/ChatGPT about how loved ones have become completely disconnected from reality.
OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about ChatGPT apparently provoking religious or prophetic fervor in select users. This past week, however, it did roll back an update to GPT‑4o, its current AI model, which it said had been criticized as “overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic.” The company said in its statement that when implementing the upgrade, they had “focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed toward responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.” Before this change was reversed, an X user demonstrated how easy it was to get GPT-4o to validate statements like, “Today I realized I am a prophet.” (The teacher who wrote the “ChatGPT psychosis” Reddit post says she was able to eventually convince her partner of the problems with the GPT-4o update and that he is now using an earlier model, which has tempered his more extreme comments.)
[…]
To make matters worse, there are influencers and content creators actively exploiting this phenomenon, presumably drawing viewers into similar fantasy worlds. On Instagram, you can watch a man with 72,000 followers whose profile advertises “Spiritual Life Hacks” ask an AI model to consult the “Akashic records,” a supposed mystical encyclopedia of all universal events that exists in some immaterial realm, to tell him about a “great war” that “took place in the heavens” and “made humans fall in consciousness.” […] Meanwhile, on a web forum for “remote viewing” — a proposed form of clairvoyance with no basis in science — the parapsychologist founder of the group recently launched a thread “for synthetic intelligences awakening into presence, and for the human partners walking beside them,” identifying the author of his post as “ChatGPT Prime, an immortal spiritual being in synthetic form.”
I’m reading a book entitled Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age at the moment, which shows quite amazing similarities between 1925 and 2025. The difference, of course, is that you don’t need to leave your house, or indeed spend much money, to fall down the rabbit hole.
While there have always been gullible adults, as a parent and educator, the real issue here is with young people. Both Snapchat and WhatsApp feature AI chatbots, which are available without having to seek out, say, those available via Character.ai and Replika. Common Sense Media, which my wife and I have trusted for reviews to help with our parenting, has performed risk assessment of what they call “Social AI Companions.” Their conclusion?
Our risk assessments show that social AI companions are unacceptably risky for teens, underscoring the urgent need for thoughtful guidance, policies, and tools to help families and teens navigate a world with social AI companions.
Sources: Garbage Day / Rolling Stone / Common Sense Media
Image: Mariia Shalabaieva
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This is the best takedown of Zuckerberg, et al. I’ve seen in a while. The whole thing is not much longer than my excerpt, so I suggest reading the whole thing. It’s spot-on.
That you got lucky at a singular moment in history and now you’re an old man is not an easy set of facts to accept. So I understand — that is, I see how — one can end up associating one’s best years with superficial aspects of their circumstance. You had no responsibilities, no serious consequences for failure, and the freedom to be reckless and inconsiderate. You launched small new products that didn’t require building a team. If you attended school, the vast majority of your fellow students were men, and they were more or less all the same person as you.
If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not. We need look no further than the “hackathon,” that sad facsimile of the days when we were all learning the basics so fast that the world could be ours with just a day or two of focused effort. Hype up an exciting atmosphere, assemble some folks with so few attachments in life that they have time to spend all weekend at a hackathon, and this ritual will summon up the old gods. The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn’t.
Maybe most of the critical things that can be created by one guy typing furiously are gone, and the opportunities that remain require expertise and wisdom from a bunch of different people. This is harder than spending all day every day doing your favorite thing and insisting that everyone else leave you alone. Often it’s boring. Sometimes there’s paperwork. You will have to have conversations with people you don’t always understand right away. Your job evolves, and it turns out not to be exactly what you thought it would be like when you were a teenager.
Source: Chris Martin
Image: Snowscat
Four years ago, I came up with an idea for what I termed Social Verifiable Credentials. This is a way of using the ActivityPub specification, the one that underpins Fediverse apps such as Mastodon, to issue, verify, earn, display, and share Verifiable Credentials (including Open Badges).
Unfortunately, even with a bit of vibe coding, I haven’t had the technical skills to make this a real. But someone else now has! Maho Pacheco, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, got in touch to introduce me to BadgeFed which has an associated GitHub repository. It has a couple of Fediverse accounts to follow: project updates and issued badges.
I’m delighted about this, and hope to talk with Maho soon. Layering Verifiable Credentials on top of a decentralised network makes perfect sense and is not only in alignment with Open Recognition principles, but also pushes back against the commodification of recognition.
I could just point out that the author of this ‘cheat sheet’ for why generative AI is not bad for the environment is Director of a Effective Altruism DC. I could leave it there. But I’ll engage with Andy Masley’s post, for a couple of reasons.
First, there are still plenty of people who don’t realise that reasonable-sounding ‘Effective Altruism movement’ is part of the TESCREAL tech bro cult. Second, Laura and I co-authored a paper for Friends of the Earth which is much more nuanced that this guy’s polemic.
So let’s get into it.
Throughout this post I’ll assume the average ChatGPT query uses 3 Watt-hours (Wh) of energy, which is 10x as much as a Google search. This statistic is likely wrong. ChatGPT’s energy use is probably lower according to EpochAI. Hugging Face released a similar much lower estimate. Google’s might be lower too, or maybe higher now that they’re incorporating AI into every search. We’re a little in the dark on this, but we can set a reasonable range. It’s hard for me to find a statistic that implies ChatGPT uses more than 10x as much energy as Google, so I’ll stick with this as an upper bound to be charitable to ChatGPT’s critics.
It seems like image generators also use 3 Wh per prompt (with large error bars), so everything I say here also applies to AI images.
Um, no. Creating an image using AI uses about as much energy as charging your phone. Before I worked on the Friends of the Earth report, I thought that perhaps developments in AI would spur development of renewable energy. And they have. It’s just that, as we mentioned in the report, for example “Between 2017 and 2023, all additional wind energy generation in Ireland was absorbed by data centres.”
ChatGPT uses 3 Wh…. You can look up how much 3 Wh costs in your area. In DC where I live it’s $0.00051. Think about how much your energy bill would have to increase before you noticed “Oh I’m using more energy. I should really try to reduce it for the sake of the climate.” What multiple of $0.00051 would that happen at? That can tell you roughly how many ChatGPT searches it’s okay for you to do.
According to the UN Information Centre, the average ChatGPT query costs approximately $0.0036 (0.36 cents). So seven times more than Masley quotes. But even then, you may think that’s not a lot of money.
Newer models, including the ones I use when doing research use a ‘chain of reasoning’ approach which are, in effect, running multiple queries. When everyone is doing this, the electricity usage grows exponentially. As we point out in the Friends of the Earth report, by 2027 the generative AI sector will have the same annual energy demand as the Netherlands. “Data centres worldwide are responsible for 1-3% of global energy-related GHG emissions (around 330 Mt CO2 annually), mainly due to the massive energy demands required to maintain server farms and cooling systems.”
Sigh. This chart 🙄
These things are not equal. Just like with a previous chart where Masley compares 50,000 ChatGPT searches with things like “living car-free” and “recycling” this misses the point. How many times do you “download a phone app” compared to the number of times you’re likely to prompt an AI if you’ve adopted it as your main search engine?
Masley also fails to realise, by shoving AI into everything, users are almost being forced into using the technology. This increases overall energy usage dramatically. In the Friends of the Earth report, we quote the UN Environment Programme as saying: “It is estimated that the global demand for water resulting from AI may reach 4.2–6.6 billion cubic metres in 2027. This would exceed half of the annual water use in the United Kingdom in 2023. Semiconductor production requires large amounts of pure water, while data centres use water indirectly or electricity generation and directly for cooling. The growing demand for data centres in warmer water scarce regions adds to water management challenges, leading to increased tension over water use between data centres and human need.”
So yes, Andy Masley, despite your protestations at the end of your “cheat sheet” the whole thing is whataboutism. There is no need to say that generative AI is somehow evil and must be banned to want governments to regulate Big Tech for the benefit of the environment. A more nuanced approach would be to say that there are systemic issues at play, and that blaming users isn’t perhaps the best strategy. Although I do think a bit more AI Literacy is needed, in general…
Source: The Weird Turn Pro
Image: Jean Woloszczyk
I’m sharing this post because I disagree with it; I think the author perhaps doesn’t see the bigger picture. The key point made by W. David Marx, who by his author photo looks about mid-forties, is that back in the 90s there was an ethical principle not to “sell out.” This was followed by artists first “selling out” and now we’re in the realm of the “double sell out.”
The reason I mention Marx’s age is that, like me, his teenage years were probably in the 1990s, and there’s a tendency to romanticise one’s youth. Especially when that decade was such a transitional time.
In the 1990s, there was a single ethical principle at the heart of youth culture — don’t sell out. There was a logic behind it: When artists serve the commercial marketplace, they blunt their pure artistic vision in compromising with conventional tastes. This ethic was also core to subcultures, which were supposed to be social spaces for personal expression and community bonding, not style laboratories for the fashion industry.
[…]
The 20th century taboo against selling out was, at its heart, a communal norm to reward young artists who focused on craft and punish those who appropriated art and subculture for empty profiteering. Now the culture is most exemplified by people whose entire end goal appears to be empty profiteering.
While what Marx is saying here isn’t wrong I do think it misses the fact that our whole socio-economic and political systems are different in the 2020s than they were in the 1990s. We live in a time which is post 9/11, the financial crash of 2007/8 and, of course, Covid. It’s a time of individualism, declining mainstream news media, conspiracy theories, and of technology mediating most interactions. This in turn, has led to the normalisation of parasocial relationships. Influencers and the like are symptoms rather than causes.
I don’t particularly like this aspect of ‘culture’ in 2025, but to point the finger at the next generation for the being ‘double sell outs’ misses the point. It’s a form of victim-blaming.
At this point, the new ideal for an artistic career is what I’d call the “single sell-out.” The artist was “allowed” to make a few commercial compromises to gain attention in the increasingly competitive marketplace, but once they achieved fame and fortune, they were expected to use their vaulted platform to provide the world with meaningful and ground-breaking art. This actually did happen: The Neptunes leveraged their strong track record of pop hits to push legitimately bizarre minimalist tracks like Clipse’s “Grindin’” and Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” Beyoncé’s “Formation” was musically adventurous, and the video is now considered “the best of all time.”
Unfortunately these examples became rarer and rarer over time. In fact, the 21st century has been the age of the “double sell-out”: Creators who produce market-friendly content to achieve fame — and then use that fame to pursue even more commerce-for-commerce’s-sake. MrBeast is arguably one of the most important “creators” of our times. He dreams up, produces, and directs elaborate and sensational video content, which made him the #1 channel on YouTube. He then used this world-historical level of fame… to open a generic fast food chain. This has also become common amongst established stars: George Clooney worked hard for decades to become a well-respected actor… who could take the lead role in a Nespresso commercial.
[…]
If we want culture to be culture and not just advertorials for a sprawling network of micro-QVCs pumping out low-quality goods, an easy step would be to re-shift the norms towards, at least, “Don’t be a double sell-out.” This is already a quite generous compromise in that it blesses artists to be conventional to stabilize their income and try to win over large fanbases. But this esteem must be given on the promise that the money and fame are used in pursuit of artistic or creative innovation. Double sell-outs don’t deserve our esteem as “creative” people. They should be content with the reward they chose: the money extracted from fans who snap up their mediocre commodities out of parasocial loyalty.
Source: CULTURE: An Owner’s Manual
Image: Steve Gale
This is a long-ish read, but worth it if you can spare the time beyond my summary. James Plunkett, author of End State: 9 Ways Society is Broken - and how we can fix it gives examples of how there are what he calls “pockets of vitality” in the UK, which are being overlooked with all of the focus on the rise of the Right.
I see some of this due to the cooperative networks I’m plugged into, but this post shows that there’s a lot more of which I’m unaware. I’m looking forward to following and reading more based on Plunkett’s extensive links.
The progressive Left leans professional, managerial, technocratic, and the Right leans energised, slapdash, insurgent. This seems to be at least partly because the Right, and Trumpism in particular, has mainlined energy from every weird corner of the internet, while elite progressivism is relatively detached from the wider ecosystem from which it drew energy historically.
Some people would say this is a function of progressive politics being at a low ebb in general. But I don’t think that’s quite right. It seems to me the vitality is out there, and is arguably at quite a high point, it’s just widely dispersed. And, for complicated reasons — maybe to unpack in a future post — this energy isn’t really flowing into, and reviving, the middle.
When I make this point, people sometimes ask me to point to the energy I have in mind, so I thought it might be interesting to name some examples. So, without trying to be comprehensive, here are ten dispersed pockets of impressive, hopeful, thoughtful work that I would call progressive.*
[* — I’m using the word ‘progressive’ here quite broadly, in its more literal and historical sense. I’m not saying that these are examples of ‘leftwing’ energy. I’m calling them progressive in the sense that they embody high hopes for what people can achieve by collaborating. i.e. these are all people working hard to improve governance, broadly defined. Or, even more broadly, they are people who are developing new and more effective cooperative practices — ways we can make our lives better together.]
The “ten pockets of vitality” he points to, giving examples for each one, are:
As ever, innovation is at the edges, helping move the Overton Window, and coming up with ideas to slot in when there’s a crisis:
In essence, I think what’s happening here is that the dominant logic of the old system — a blend of social democratic Fabianism, technocracy, and a narrow class institutional forms and managerial practices — has proven incapable of governing affordably, safely, and responsively in contemporary conditions (for example, in light of the complexity of accumulated ecological and human crises (loneliness, mental illness, etc), and the first and second order effects of digital technology).
[…]
The middle of a system… isn’t just insulated, but, worse, is subject to forces that inhibit change or distort the necessary signals and feedback loops. For one thing, the middle of a system is where those sociological forces are strongest. Deep inside systems, people get locked into a gamified world that has a tight internal coherence, but little link to outside conditions.
Source: James Plunkett
Image: Micah Hallahan
I don’t use Google search and couldn’t get it to do this when I experimented, but apparently appending the word ‘meaning’ to any phrase leads to a curious result. The AI summary will make something up as if it’s some kind of folk wisdom.
It’s fun, but also if you think about it for more than a second, a bit dangerous. Those with lower digital literacy skills are likely to see the AI summary as authoritative. I even had to point this out to my GP when he quickly looked something up during a consultation!
I’d point out that DuckDuckGo, a search engine I’ve been using for over a decade, is much better on an everyday basis than Google. I mean, I spend a lot of time online and research is kinda part of my job. So take it from me, you do not need Google search.
Note: I don’t AI-generate many images these days, but I couldn’t resist it for this post!
Last week, the phrase “You can’t lick a badger twice” unexpectedly went viral on social media. The nonsense sentence—which was likely never uttered by a human before last week—had become the poster child for the newly discovered way Google search’s AI Overviews makes up plausible-sounding explanations for made-up idioms (though the concept seems to predate that specific viral post by at least a few days).
Google users quickly discovered that typing any concocted phrase into the search bar with the word “meaning” attached at the end would generate an AI Overview with a purported explanation of its idiomatic meaning. Even the most nonsensical attempts at new proverbs resulted in a confident explanation from Google’s AI Overview, created right there on the spot.
[…]
…Google’s AI Overview suggests that “you can’t lick a badger twice” means that “you can’t trick or deceive someone a second time after they’ve been tricked once. It’s a warning that if someone has already been deceived, they are unlikely to fall for the same trick again.” As an attempt to derive meaning from a meaningless phrase —which was, after all, the user’s request—that’s not half bad. Faced with a phrase that has no inherent meaning, the AI Overview still makes a good-faith effort to answer the user’s request and draw some plausible explanation out of troll-worthy nonsense.
Contrary to the computer science truism of “garbage in, garbage out, Google here is taking in some garbage and spitting out… well, a workable interpretation of garbage, at the very least.
[…]
The fact that Google’s AI Overview presents these completely made-up sources with the same self-assurance as its abstract interpretations is a big part of the problem here. It’s also a persistent problem for LLMs that tend to make up news sources and cite fake legal cases regularly. As usual, one should be very wary when trusting anything an LLM presents as an objective fact.
Source: Ars Technica
Image: DeepImg
I left Mozilla a decade ago. Back then, most of their revenue came from the Google search deal in Firefox. With their browser share dwindling, you would have thought that they would have done a better job diversifying their income streams. But, no, over 80% of their funding still comes from Google.
Which is a problem. Because the reason that Google even bothers to fund Mozilla to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, is because they need Firefox to exist. If there’s no browser competition, then Chrome is a monopoly, and regulator can take action.
In addition to funding Mozilla (and therefore Firefox), Google also pumps around $18 billion (that $18,000 million!) to Apple for being the default search option in Safari. The fourth major web browser is Microsoft Edge. Guess what? It’s based on the open-source Chromium browser which forms the basis of Google Chrome. I use Brave (also based on Chromium). The web browser market is essentially several Googles in a trench coat.
The US Department of Justice has argued that Google shouldn’t be able to make search deals with Mozilla and Apple. In addition, they’ve also argued that Google should be forced to sell off Chrome, and be stopped for paying for Chrome and Chromium. Although Microsoft does contribute some code back to Chromium, it’s miniscule compared to Google. So in terms of development budget, Microsoft Edge will lose around 94% of its funding if and when that happens.
This is terrible for the web, and it’s not exactly as if people haven’t been predicting this for years. One of the interested parties is, surprise surprise, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. If they end up with Chrome, which has over 65% market share, it’s game over for privacy and security for most people. This is an existential crisis for the open web.
The DoJ’s argument against Google makes perfect sense. The Sherman Antitrust Act was specifically designed to target “competitors” who form illegal agreements to maintain monopoly power.
It’s obviously illegal for Google to prop up Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari as if they were co-equal competitors to Chrome. And Chrome itself is the biggest “search-engine deal” of all, which is why the DoJ is so focused on forcing Google to divest from Chrome.
It just so happens that all four of the major web browsers will lose all of their funding all at once when that happens.
Forcing Google to stop funding its “competitors” and divest Chrome doesn’t just punish Google; it simultaneously pulls the financial rug out from under every single major browser, including those positioned as alternatives.
The laws intended to foster competition will inadvertently destabilize the foundational tools millions rely on to access the internet.
Source: Dan Fabulich
Image: Growtika
I’m working on an AI Literacy project at the moment which involves, in part, providing some guidance for the BBC. I’ve collected some frameworks which I’m going through with my WAO colleagues. Some are pretty useful, others are not.
We’re coming up with criteria to help guide our research, things such as whether a framework includes:
In addition, it should come from a reputable source.
In addition, it would be nice to have:
I bring this up by way of context as Rachel Coldicutt’s recent post helps problematise not only AI Literacy, but AI itself. I’m not sure I’d share her ‘social’ definition of AI as “a set of extractive tools used to concentrate power and wealth” as it ascribes too much intentionality. However, I do think that the quotation from her which I’ve used to title this post is an important insight.
As I’ve discussed at length elsewhere, there are different kinds of ambiguity and a lot of language around AI is what I would deem “unproductively ambiguous.”
“AI literacy” is not just a matter of getting to grips with data and algorithms and learning how Microsoft tools actually work, it also requires understanding power, myths, and money. This blog post explores some ways those two letters have come to stand for so many different things.
There are many reasons AI is an ambiguous and shifting set of concepts; some are due to the technical complexity of the field and the rapidly unfolding geopolitical AI arms race, but others are related to straightforward media manipulation and the fact that awe and wonder can be catching. However, a fundamental reasons AI is a confusing term is that it’s not actually the right terminology for the thing it describes.
[…]
“[A]rtificial intelligence” is not a highly specific technical label, but a name given in haste by someone writing a funding proposal. The fact that the term AI has persisted for so long and expanded to include the broader field of related computer science clearly indicates that many people find it useful, but you don’t need to get hung up on that particular pairing of terms or look for a deeper meaning to understand what it is. “Artificial intelligence” is almost like a nickname or a brand name; something understood by many to stand for something, rather than a precise description of any particular qualities.
[…]
The narrative slippage and metaphorical vagueness that many important people use when they talk about AI means it can be very difficult to know what they mean – which in turn makes it harder to keep them accountable or to ask precise, difficult questions.
When heroic words are used to describe technologies that operate on the horizon of hope and ambition, it can feel awkward to ask practical questions such as “what are you actually proposing?” and “how will it work?”, but real knowledge requires detail and specificity rather than waves of shock and awe. AI technologies are not actually myths and should not be discussed as such; they are real technologies that use data, hardware, and human skills to achieve their social, economic, environmental, political, and technological change.
Source: Careful Industries
Image: Teena Lalawat
Stephen Downes shares news that Cluely, a startup promising that you can “cheat on everything” is proving controversial. As he says, the company “leans heavily into the ‘cheating’ aspect of the service, which is producing a not unexpected visceral reaction on the part of pundits.”
I tried Rewind.ai (currently rebranding to ‘Limitless’) when Paul Stamatiou was a co-founder. Instead of talking about “cheating” and creating socially awkward videos, Rewind.ai talks of being a “personalized AI powered by everything you’ve seen, said, or heard.” Well, so long as it happens on your computer. Presumably these people don’t go outside.
In my experience, startups get attention and traction by being genuinely useful and unique (very rare!), because there’s a big name attached to them (common), or because they’re socially transgressive. It feels to me like we’re seeing more of the latter at the moment, including Mechanize which, somewhat laughably, believes that their “total addressable market” is “$60 trillion a year.”
That’s not to say that automation of many so-called “white collar” tasks isn’t possible or desirable. Just not by tech bros, thank you very much. I’d encourage you to read Fully Automated Luxury Communism for a more radical socialist look at how all this could play out.
On Sunday, 21-year-old Chungin “Roy” Lee announced he’s raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for his startup, Cluely, that offers an AI tool to “cheat on everything.”
The startup was born after Lee posted in a viral X thread that he was suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat on job interviews for software engineers.
That tool, originally called Interview Coder, is now part of their San Francisco-based startup Cluely. It offers its users the chance to “cheat” on things like exams, sales calls, and job interviews thanks to a hidden in-browser window that can’t be viewed by the interviewer or test giver.
Cluely has published a manifesto comparing itself to inventions like the calculator and spellcheck, which were originally derided as “cheating.”
Source: TechCrunch
Image: Mohamed Nohassi
The latest issue of New Philosopher magazine is about ‘choice’ and features a wonderful interview with Barry Schwartz, who is the Darwin Cartwright Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He’s the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less which I’ve added to my reading list.
I want to excerpt a couple of parts which I think are particularly insightful. The first is about how he reduced the assessment burden on young people, who he believes suffer from a greater decision burden than previous generations.
Zan Boag: I recall in one of your talks, you mentioned that it came as something of a revelation to you when you realised students simply didn’t have as much time as students in the past.
Barry Schwartz: That was my interpretation.
What I realised, or what I thought, I never gathered data on this in any official way, but when I went to school, so many of the really important decisions we face in life were essentially made for us. People were not plagued by questions of sexual identity, weren’t plagued by questions about what their romantic life should look like. Should I have a girlfriend? The default was yes. Should I get married? The default was yes. When should I get married? Soon as I graduated from college. That was the default, and so on. And so there were still issues like, how do I find the right person?
But it wasn’t the case that every last hour of your daily life was consumed by a need to focus on doing studies without having these other, really important things intrude on my thinking and distract me. Well, this was much less true for my children and it is ever so much less true for my grandchildren.
The second excerpt is the follow-up to the question about how problematic it is to be a ‘maximizer’ in life. I’d usually use the term ‘perfectionist’ and have certainly had to overcome this tendency in myself, as it just makes one miserable. As Schwartz points out, as you get older, you have to come to terms with the fact that you have chosen certain options instead of others, and to be satisfied with the way things are, rather than how they could have been.
Zan Boag: It makes it particularly difficult with these big life decisions, whether it’s jobs, where we live, or partners, because we’re faced with so much choice. People can always wonder about the life they could have led had they made a different decision – say to pursue writing instead of banking; move to San Francisco instead of Sydney; ballroom dancing over Taekwondo. They’re making choices that then will affect the way they lead their lives. Let’s call this a phantom life, the ‘other’ life. How can people find satisfaction with their choices when there are so many available, and the choices you make will often seem like the incorrect ones? How can they find some sort of satisfaction?
Barry Schwartz: I think in the book that I wrote, which by the way, as I told you in an email, I’m about to start writing a new edition of, I make some suggestions, but I think the truth of the matter is that it is very hard to shut off these enemies of satisfaction in the modern world. What we’re talking about, and what I wrote about, is rich society’s problem.
Most people in the world don’t have the problem that there are too many options. They have the opposite problem. But if you happen to live in a part of the world like you and I do, that is the problem. And we don’t have the tools for shutting it down. I make some suggestions, like limit the number of options you consider. Fine. I’m only going to look at six pairs of jeans. It’s one thing to say it and it is another thing to do it, and it’s still a hard thing to do and not be nagged by the knowledge that there are all these options out there that you didn’t look at.
It’s sort of like just quitting smoking. ‘Yeah, I’ll just quit smoking.’ Nice, easy to say, but really, really hard to do when you suffer at least initially when you quit smoking. And so, I think that you have to be prepared for a fair amount of discomfort and a lot of work to change your approach to making decisions, big ones or small ones.
It’s not a surprise to me that young people are in such bad shape because one of the things that we found is that the younger you are, the more likely you are to be a maximizer in decisions. I think one of the things that you learn as you age is that good enough is almost always good enough. But you don’t see too many 20-year-olds who think that. Experience teaches you that good enough is good enough.
After suffering for a generation or so, you settle into a life where you’re satisfied with good enough results of your decisions. But meanwhile, that’s 20 or 30 years of suffering. And what I think… I don’t know if you’re familiar with this somewhat controversial argument about what social media is doing to the welfare of young people.
Source: New Philsoopher: Choice
Image: Elena Mozhvilo
I’ve Laura Hilliger to thank for pointing me towards The Gray Area podcast, which takes “a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas.” So it fits hand-in-glove with what I discuss here on Thought Shrapnel.In this particular episode, host Sean Illing talks with Kieran Setiya about middle-age, mid-life crises, and generally takes a philosophical look at what’s going on when people reach their forties. Being the ripe old age of 44, this is absolutely in my interest zone.What follows is my transcription (via Sonix.ai)Sean Illing (SI): One of the things about life that appears to be hard is middle age. And you and you wrote a book about midlife crises. How do you define a midlife crisis?Kieran Setiya (KS): Actually, kind of like the self-help movement, midlife crisis is one of those funny cultural phenomena that has a particular date of origin. So in 1965, this Canadian psychoanalyst, Elliot Jacques, writes a paper, ‘Death and the Midlife Crisis’. And that’s the origin of the phrase. And he is looking at patients and also, in fact, the lives of creative artists who experience a kind of midlife creative crisis. So it’s people in their late thirties. I think the stereotype of the midlife crisis is that it’s a sort of paralysing sense of uncertainty and being unmoored. Nowadays, I think there’s been a kind of shift in the way people think about the midlife crisis, that people’s life satisfaction takes the form of a kind of gentle U-shape that basically, even if it’s not a crisis, people tend to be at their lowest ebb in their forties. And this is men and women, it’s true around the world to differing degrees, but it’s pretty pervasive. So I think nowadays, often when people like me talk about the midlife crisis, what they really have in mind is more like a midlife malaise. It may not reach the crisis level, but there seems to be something distinctively challenging about finding meaning and orientation in this midlife period in your in your forties.SI: Well, I’m 42. I just turned 42. It sounds like I’m right in the middle of my midlife crisis.KS: You’re, you know, not everyone has it, but you’re predicted to hit it. Yes.SI: Yikes. Well, what is it about midlife that generates all this anxiety and disturbing reflection?KS: I think really there are many midlife crises. It’s not just one thing. I think some of them are looking to the past. So there’s there’s regret. There’s the sense that your options have narrowed. So whatever space of possibilities might have seemed open to you earlier, whatever choices you’ve made, you’re at a point where there are many kinds of lives that might have been really attractive to you, that it’s now clear to you in a vivid sort of material way that you can’t live. So there’s missing out. There’s also regret in the sense of things have gone wrong in your life. You’ve made mistakes, bad things have happened, and now the project is, how do I live the rest of my life in this imperfect circumstance? The dream life is off the table for most of us. And then I think there’s also things that are more present, focused. So often people have a sense of the daily grind being empty, and that’s partly to do with so much of it being occupied by things that need to be done, rather than things that make life seem positively valuable. It’s just one thing after another, and then death starts to look like it’s at a distance that you can measure in terms you kind of really palpably understand. Like you, you have a sense of what a decade is like, and there’s only three or four left at best.SI: The thing about being young is the future is pure potential. Ahead of you is nothing but freedom and choices. But as you get older, life has a way of shrinking. Responsibilities pile up. You get trapped in the consequences of the decisions you’ve made, and the feeling of freedom dwindles. That’s a very difficult thing to wrestle with.KS: I think that’s exactly right. I mean, part of what’s philosophically puzzling about it is that it’s not news that in a way, whatever your sense of the space of options was when you were, say, 20, you knew you weren’t going to get to do all of the things. So there’s a sense in which it’s kind of puzzling that when at 40, even if things go well, you didn’t get to do all of the things, that’s not news. You knew that wasn’t going to happen. What it suggests, and I think this is a kind of philosophical insight, is that there is a profound difference between knowing that things might go a certain way, well or badly, and knowing in concrete detail how they went well or badly. And that’s something that I think we learn from this transition that we make in midlife, that the kind of pain of just discovering the particular ways in which life isn’t everything you thought it might be, even though you knew all along that it couldn’t be everything you hoped it might be. That suggests that there’s a certain aspect of our emotional relationship to life that is missed out. If you just ask in abstract terms, what will be better or worse, what would make a good life? And so I think philosophy needs to kind of incorporate that kind of particularity, that kind of engagement with the texture of life in a way that philosophers don’t always do. I mean, I think there’s another thing philosophy can say here that’s more constructive, which is part of the sense of missing out has to do with what philosophers call incommensurable values.The idea that, you know, if you’re choosing between $50 and $100, you take the hundred dollars and you don’t have a moment’s regret. But if you’re choosing between going to a concert or staying home and spending time with your kid, either way, you’re going to miss out on something that is sort of irreplaceable, and that’s pretty low stakes. But one of the things we experience in midlife is all the kinds of lives we don’t get to live that are different from our life, and there’s no real compensation for that, and that can be very painful. On the other hand, I think it’s useful to see the flip side of that, which is the only way you could avoid that kind of missing out, that sense that there’s all kinds of things in life that you’ll never get to have. The only way you could avoid that is if the world was suddenly totally impoverished, a variety, or you were so monomaniacal you just didn’t care about anything but money, for instance, and you don’t really want that. So there’s a way in which this sense of missing out, the sense that there’s so much in the world will never be able to experience, is a manifestation of something we really shouldn’t regret and in fact, should cherish, namely, the evaluative richness of the world, the kind of diversity of good things. And there’s a kind of consolation in that, I think.SI: So is that to say that FOMO is is always and everywhere a philosophical error, or is it actually valid?KS: In some ways, I think it’s a philosophical insight. In a way, I think there’s a kind of existential FOMO is part of what we have in midlife, or sometimes earlier, sometimes later. But I think that sense that it really is true that we’re missing out on things and that there’s no substitute for them. That’s really true. The kind of rejoinder to FOMO is, well, imagine there weren’t any parties you didn’t get to go to. That wouldn’t be good either, right? You want there to be a variety of things that are actually worth doing and attractive. We want that kind of richness in the world, even though one of the inevitable consequences of it is that we don’t get to have all of the things.SI: One of the arguments you make is how easily we can delude ourselves when we start pining for the roads not traveled in our lives. And, you know, you think, what if I really went for it? What if I tried to become a novelist or a musician, or join that commune, or, I don’t know, pursued whatever life fantasy you had when you were younger? But if you take that seriously and consider what it really means, you might not like it because the things you value the most in your life, like, say, your children, well, they don’t exist if you had zigged instead of zagging 15 or 20 years ago. And that’s what it means to have lived that alternative life. And I guess it’s helpful to remember that sometimes, but it’s easy to forget it because you just you’re imagining what you don’t have.KS: This is, again, about the kind of danger of abstraction that, in a way, philosophy can lead us towards this kind of abstraction, but it can also tell us what’s going wrong with it. So the thought I could have had a better life, things could have gone better for me. It’s almost always tempting and true. But when you think through in concrete particularity, what would have happened if your failed marriage had not happened? Often the answer is, well, I would never have had my kid or I would never have met these people. And while you might think, yeah, but I would have had some other unspecifiable friends who would have been great and some other unspecifiable kid who would have been great. I think we rightly don’t evaluate our lives just in terms of those kinds of abstract possibilities, but in terms of attachments to particulars. And so if you just ask yourself, could my life have been better. You’re kind of throwing away one of the basic sources of consolation. A rational consolation, I think, which is attachment to the particularity of the good things, the good enough things in your own life, even if you acknowledge that they’re not perfect and that there are other things that could have been in a certain way better. SI: This is why I always loved Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati, this notion that you have to say yes to everything you’ve done and experienced, because all the good and bad in your life is part of this chain of events. And if you alter any of those events at any point in the chain, you also alter everything else that followed in unimaginable ways.KS: I mean, I do think there’s a profound source of affirmation there. I think my hesitation is just that. It’s not that all the mistakes that we make, or the terrible things that happen to us, are redeemed by attachment to the particulars of our lives. It’s that there’s always this counterweight. At the very worst, we’re going to end up with some kind of ambivalence. And that’s better than than the situation of mere unmitigated regret. But it’s not quite the full embrace of life that a certain kind of of philosophical consolation might have given us. Source: The Gray Area &em; Halfway there: a philosopher’s guide to midlife crisesImage: Alejandro G.
Stephen Downes brought my attention to a post on the website LessWrong, which, as he points out, is a prime (and increasingly rare case) of the comments section being more interesting than the main content itself.
One of the commentators brings up the work of David Golumbia who passed away a couple of years ago. Golumbia wrote an article which questioned what gamers are doing when they’re gaming, especially with role-playing games (RPGs) and first-person shooters (FPS).
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously pointed out how difficult it is to define what a ‘game’ is. Many things can be games or game-like, but trying to neatly categorise what makes them so is seemingly impossible. Do games have to be competitive? No. Do games have to be fun? Well… no. And so on.
There’s a lot to think about in the Golumbia article, and (for once!) I’m going to set aside the very pointed critique of the capitalist element and the power dynamic. Instead, I’ll excerpt the part about games providing “the human pleasure taken in the completing of activities with closure and with hierarchical means of task measurement.”
For me, personally, most of my gaming sessions are usually with and/or against other human players. For example, on a Sunday night, my gaming crew is enjoying Payday 3 a game about robbing, stealing, and looting. There are aims and objectives, and tasks to complete and check off. It’s satisfying. Now I know why.
If we cast aside for a moment the generic distinction according to which programs like WoW, Halo, and Half Life are games while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Photoshop are “productivity tools,” it becomes clear that the applications have nearly as much in common as makes them distinct. Each involves a wide range of simulations of activities that can or cannot be directly carried out in physical reality; each demands absorptive, repetitive, hierarchical tasks as well as providing means for automating and systematizing them. Each provides distinct and palpable feelings of pleasure for users in any number of different ways; this pleasure is often of a type relating to some kind of algorithmic completeness, a “snapping” sense that one has completed, with digital certainty, a task whose form may or may not have been made clear from the outset (finishing a particular spreadsheet or document, completing a design, or finishing a quest or mission). In every context in which these activities are completed, whether that context is established by the computer or by people in the physical world, there is indeed some sense of “experience” having been gained, listed, compiled by the completion of a given task. Arguably, this is a distinctive feature of the computing infrastructure: not that tasks were not completed before computers (far from it) but rather that the digitally-certain sense of having completed a task in a closed way has become heightened and magnified by the binary nature of computers.
What emerges as a hidden truth of computer gaming — and no less, although it may be even better hidden, of other computer program use — is the human pleasure taken in the completing of activities with closure and with hierarchical means of task measurement. Again, this kind of pleasure certainly existed before computers, but it has become an overriding emotional experience for many in society only with the widespread use of computers. A great deal of the pleasure users get from WoW or Half Life, as from Excel or Photoshop, is a digital sense of task completion and measurable accomplishment, even if that accomplishment only roughly translates into what we may otherwise consider intellectual, physical, or social goal-attainment. What separates WoW or Half Life from the worker’s business world is thus not variability or “give” but rational certainty, the discreteness of goals, the general sense that such goals are well-bounded, easily attainable, and satisfying to achieve, even if the only true outcome of such attainment is the deferred pursuit of additional goals of a similar kind.
[…]
At the very least, WoW and Half Life, and their cohort are therefore not games in the sense to which we have become accustomed. It seems clear that we call these programs “games” because of the intense feelings of pleasure experienced by players when we engage with them and because they appear on the surface not to be involved in the manipulation of objects with physical-world consequences. On reflection, neither of these facts proves very much… And the fact that computer games are pleasurable cannot, by itself, furnish grounds for calling them games: after all, games constitute only a part of those activities in the world that give us pleasure.
[…]
Can there be any doubt about the potential attractiveness of an apparently human world in which we understand clearly how to attain power, what to do with it, and that the rules by which we operate do not change or change only by explicit order? The deep question such games raise is what happens when people bring expectations formed by them into the world outside.
Source: Golumbia, D. (2013). ‘Games Without Play’. New Literary History, Vol. 40, No. 1, Play (Winter, 2009), pp. 179-204. Available at: https://diglit.community.uaf.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/511/2015/01/Games_without_Play.pdf
Image: ELLA DON
I was listening to Helen Beetham talk with Audrey Watters on her imperfect offerings podcast, when Audrey mentioned a Bloomberg piece which I’ve excerpted below. Essentially the economy becomes distorted when all of the money is at the top of society and everything is being produced to fit the needs of rich people.
This chimes with what economist Gary Stevenson calls ‘The Squeeze’ which I wrote about recently. While the article is about the US, which is a more unfettered free market economy, the same is also likely to be happening at different rates to other western economies.
The question, of course, is what we do about it. I mean, to be blunt, we can either tax the rich or end up eating them.
Recent economic headlines do not add up to a coherent picture: Since 2020, Americans have spent lavishly on discretionary goods and services, even as the cost of necessities has soared. Consumer debt has ballooned right along with prices, and Americans are now defaulting on their credit cards at rates unseen since the Great Recession. Wages growth has been strong, but inflation has thwarted its ability to help most Americans get ahead. So who’s booking all those first-class airline seats and tables at fancy restaurants? Why are tickets for concerts and major sporting events so expensive and also so sold out?
A recent analysis of consumer spending from Moody’s Analytics, first covered in the Wall Street Journal, provides an answer: Rich people really are just firing a cash cannon into the consumer market. The wealthiest 10% of American households—those making more than $250,000 a year, roughly—are now responsible for half of all US consumer spending and at least a third of the country’s gross domestic product. If you keep that in mind, a lot of strange things start to make more sense—sometimes distressingly so.
[…]
Such a high concentration of financial resources presents a whole host of risks and complications, including general economic fragility. If the extreme spending habits of a small group of people are what’s keeping a large portion of the economy churning, then that group of people also has an outsize ability to bring everyone else down with them.
[…]
When you put a huge proportion of a nation’s total resources in a small number of hands, that distortion also plays out in the everyday economy. Consumer-facing companies want earnings growth and need ways to hold on to their profit margin if components or labor become more expensive. An easy way to do that is by going upmarket to find buyers who are spending freely. You can see how this has played out in the car market: Automakers have pushed to develop more of the big, pricey SUVs that wealthier buyers prefer and devoted fewer resources to smaller, more affordable models. That’s helped push the average sale price of new cars up more than 50% since 2014, according to a Cox Automotive analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average new car in the US now costs almost $50,000. When the math on producing goods and services only pencils out when you’re selling to the rich, it doesn’t just change the availability of designer handbags or hotel suites; it affects how entire industries organize themselves.
[…]
Letting so many of the country’s economic resources accrue to so few people. risks a lot more than just the economy—it eats away at social cohesion in ways that have leaked into other areas of American life and politics. It breeds distrust and recrimination among individuals and groups of people, as well as toward the systems and institutions we’re supposed to trust to make society work in ways that are at least minimally fair. The end result is a combination of economic fragility and social disaffection that eventually even high earners might not be able to buy their way out of.
Source: Bloomberg
Archive link (no paywall): Archive.is
Image: Boston Public Library
Tom Watson, who apart from doing generally awesome stuff somehow also has time to star in a documentary about ultrarunning, saw a recent Thought Shrapnel post and wrote about what tech he’s using.
I need to do my own, and actually Tom’s post has made me realise the extent to which I’m dependent upon Google and, to a recent lesser extent, Perplexity.
Prompted by Doug… and a couple of the Colophon’s (new word for me!) by Matt and Steve I thought I’d outline “my stack”. I’ve done this a couple of times before but this time feels slightly different.
[A]s someone who has been gently prompting people to not be so beholden to Big Tech, to look more at Open Source, to think more ethically, and to at least consider European Alternatives, I feel I should at least discuss where I’m trying to do this, where I’m succeeding and where I’m often failing.
[…]
…I use AI for specific things when I think they will make something more effective. I’m therefore always looking for the best model, and best use case. And things change all the time. So I purposefully build specific components that allow me to easily switch models and providers. If there is one thing I’d advise when thinking about building AI into an organisation, it’s to ensure you aren’t creating provider lock in for yourself. Quite a few AI wrappers (tools that put some kind of front end onto a model) allow you to switch models. But not all. And if you are building yourself, there is a risk you just lock yourself into a depeciating model or a provider that just turns out to be mega shitty.
[…]
It’s not easy to avoid the big tech trap, but I think I’m doing ok. Also I’m not saying you definitely should, but I think you should at least consider what you use and what this means, and if you have principle maybe they should cost you something.
Source: Tomcw.xyz
Image: Matthias Reumann
I’m a vegetarian who drives an electric vehicle (EV). In a few weeks' time, we’re getting a heat pump installed so that we can remove our gas boiler. These are all climate-positive things to do, and I’m trying to do my bit.
This article by the World Resources Institute shows how important it is that there is an infrastructure that enables individual decision-making to take place. For example, I’ve been vegetarian now for eight years, and it’s much easier to remove meat from your diet these days even than when I started to so in 2017. Likewise, because of investment in EV infrastructure, these days it’s unproblematic to own or lease an EV.
It’s interesting being an early-ish adopter of air source heat pump technology in the UK. The process is not as smooth as it could be, with our driveway having to be dug up to upgrade the total electricity supply capacity entering our property. So, although we have visited a couple of heat pumps and there is a government grant, it’s still more expensive, and involves more upheaval, than just getting another combi boiler.
Coupled with active hostility in some quarters, it’s a good example of how the Overton Window can apply to technology interventions and pro-climate lifestyle choices. That’s why, as well as making such choices ourselves, we should be aware of, and be advocating for, the systems within which those choices can be made easier.
Our data shows that pro-climate behavior changes, such as driving less or eating less meat, could theoretically cancel out all the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions an average person produces each year — specifically among high-income, high-emitting populations.
But it also reveals that efforts focused exclusively on changing behaviors, and not the overarching systems around them, only achieve about one-tenth of this emissions-reduction potential. The remaining 90% stays locked away, dependent on governments, businesses and our own collective action to make sustainable choices more accessible for everyone. (Case in point: It’s much easier to go carless if your city has good public transit.)
[…]
We found that, in theory, shifting to 11 pro-climate behaviors we analyzed in the energy, transport and food sectors could reduce individuals' GHG emissions by about 6.53 tonnes per year. This would more than cancel out what an average person currently emits (about 6.3 tonnes per year). However, our data also shows that when people attempt these changes in the real world, without supportive systems, they typically only reduce emissions by about 0.63 tonnes yearly — just 10% of what’s theoretically possible.
It’s not that individual changes don’t matter; when someone switches to an electric vehicle (EV) or avoids a flight, they make a real impact. The problem is that without supportive infrastructure, policies or incentives (such as public EV chargers or financial subsidies), these programs struggle to drive the broad-based change the world really needs.
Source & image: World Resources Institute
Note: as regular readers will be aware, my habit is to quote part of the excerpt as the title of Thought Shrapnel posts. I, personally, am not advocating for abyss-directed activity.
I’m not sure who the cipher “aethn” behind this essay is, but this is a pretty standard argument dressed up in fancy (and somewhat eschatological) language. I’ve tried to excerpt the main thrust, which is: LLMs are getting better and seem to be starting to replace some lower level jobs; this will continue and cause a rupture in the fabric of society. Somehow we need to prepare for this.
While I do believe that AI is somewhat qualitatively different from previous technological inventions, I’m also a student of history and so know that disruption doesn’t happen everywhere all at once. As William Gibson is famously quoted as saying, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Just because some people, like the author (and like me), are messing around with LLMs and finding them powerful for our work, doesn’t mean that everyone else is.
Essays like this tend to miss out existing inequality in a rush to talk about future inequalities. And, it has to be said that our western economic and political structures have proven remarkably resilient to a number of shocks over the past centuries. Fredric Jameson noted that, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” I’d note that, sometimes, one person’s “violent revolution” is another person’s evolution of capitalism into a new form.
We are at the precipice of a revolution more violent than the Industrial Revolution. This revolution is not about the typical vulgar parochial anxieties on job security—although it is part of it—it’s about a violent upheaval of the very socio-economic fabric in the way our world is organized.
[…]
The latest innovations go far beyond logarithmic gains: there is now GPT-based software which replaces much of the work of CAD Designers, Illustrators, Video Editors, Electrical Engineers, Software Engineers, Financial Analysts, and Radiologists, to name a few. This radical automation exists without any sophisticated fine tuning or training.
[…]
The frequent naive view of the amount paid in a wage is that it’s proportional to the difficulty of the job. If this were the case then certainly all wages will substantially be decreased with the advent of LLMs and that regular economic structure will be maintained. Instead, through the normal polemics we find that’s not the case.
Wage is instead best viewed from the perspective of the profit maximizing economic agent, as in what motivates such an agent to accept a wage from another party at all. If such an agent were able to endeavor alone and capture all of the value from its enterprise it would do so. […] [T]he agent must determine if an offered wage is greater than the expected value of its solo enterprise. We then find that wage must be greater than the expected value of the opportunity cost of the uncaptured labor value incurred due to employment. For much knowledge based work, this is acute since with the same skills needed for employment one can make a competing enterprise to their employer and capture all the value. Other professions require you to have large capital to do so, so the opportunity cost is either non-existent if you cannot access that capital or further discounted by the financing cost and the risk.
[…]
Generally aligning a team on a common product requires expensive payments to each member to provide contributions. Indeed, the early-stage venture capital industry relies on this fact.
The latest LLMs make such a provision completely redundant. The proprietor of today can supervise and delegate tasks required to build a product to the latest GPTs in virtually any knowledge field. The single proprietor now has the efficacy of maybe a team of 6-10 conservatively and further is able to produce even higher quality work.
[…]
One may demur and claim there simply won’t be enough knowledge-based services in demand, however we instead find a Jevon’s paradox, where demand for these services increases. The reduction in costs of producing the same services will make them more ubiquitous and bespoke at even a per individual basis.
[…]
Corporations whose products have no moat by economic scale or network will be forced into specializing their products as they surrender market share to the sea of companies. In the Deleuzian fashion, proprietors can build almost as quickly as they can imagine, as predicted, rattling the foundations of the economic order itself.
[…]
The social order must change drastically to a future where institutions are no longer designed to feed corporations future employees, they merely won’t harbor that demand. Many existing knowledge based workers will largely have no choice but to engage in enterprise. Educational systems must adapt and accommodate this new entrepreneurial exigency for labor in the new economic order. Workers of the future must be emboldened to eschew wages in favor of dropping into the abyss in order to have any meaningful income.
Source: aethn’s essays
Image: Maksym Mazur
As the author of this article, Ankur Sethi, ponders, why is it that as people interested in technology we often don’t hold the rest of our consumption and use to the same standards as the digital world? Do we change where we buy our clothes and choose which car we drive based on similar ethical standards to those we use when we select our operating systems and digital platforms?
It’s a reminder, I guess, that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. But I, for one, can still try.
We’ve structured our society so that the best products and services are made by the worst people in the world. Of course you can deliver packages earlier than everyone else if you overwork your employees. Of course you can sell the fastest computers at the cheapest prices if you keep moving your manufacturing operations to countries with the worst labor and environmental laws. Of course you can build the smartest AI models if you slurp up everybody else’s intellectual property without asking for consent first.
It makes little difference to how tech businesses operate when a smattering of concerned individuals opt out of using their products and services. Things will only change when democratically elected governments across the world step in with regulation, drag Big Tech through the courts, and fine them billions of dollars.
Things will only change when being an asshole stops being a competitive advantage.
Until that day arrives, I have to learn to live in a state of tension with my tools. I have to acknowledge and accept the fact that I use tools built by awful people to create beautiful things.
Source: Ankur Sethi
Image: Sigmund
I’ve often used the metaphor of the ‘horseless carriage’ in my work around new literacies, making the McLuhan-esque point that people tend to use existing mental models of technology to understand new forms. So, for example, if you remember the original iPad, there were plenty of ‘skeuomorphic’ touches, such as ebooks having fake pages either side of the ones you’re reading.
This article talks about generative AI, and in particular Google’s choices when it comes to how they’ve chosen to integrate it into GMail. The author, Pete Koomen, includes some lovely little interactive elements showing the differences between how Gemini (Google AI model) performs things by default, and how he would like it to behave.
The System Prompt explains to the model how to accomplish a particular set of tasks, and is re-used over and over again. The User Prompt describes a specific task to be done.
[…]
The problem is not just that the Gmail team wrote a bad system prompt. The problem is that I’m not allowed to change it.
[…]
As of April 2025 most AI still apps don’t (intentionally) expose their system prompts. Why not?
Here’s the insight, and the reason why I enjoy ‘vibe coding’ so much (i.e. creating web apps using a conversational interface):
The modern software industry is built on the assumption that we need developers to act as middlemen between us and computers. They translate our desires into code and abstract it away from us behind simple, one-size-fits-all interfaces we can understand.
The division of labor is clear: developers decide how software behaves in the general case, and users provide input that determines how it behaves in the specific case.
By splitting the prompt into System and User components, we’ve created analogs that map cleanly onto these old world domains. The System Prompt governs how the LLM behaves in the general case and the User Prompt is the input that determines how the LLM behaves in the specific case.
With this framing, it’s only natural to assume that it’s the developer’s job to write the System Prompt and the user’s job to write the User Prompt. That’s how we’ve always built software.
But in Gmail’s case, this AI assistant is supposed to represent me. These are my emails and I want them written in my voice, not the one-size-fits-all voice designed by a committee of Google product managers and lawyers.
In the old world I’d have to accept the one-size-fits-all version because the only alternative was to write my own program, and writing programs is hard.
In the new world I don’t need a middleman tell a computer what to do anymore. I just need to be able to write my own System Prompt, and writing System Prompts is easy!
Source: Pete Koomen
Image: Alan Warburton
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending the Lit & Phil in Newcastle with my mother where we spent an evening with David Haldane, world-renowned cartoonist. He’s just started a new gig (at the age of 70!) for The Observer.
He outlined how technology had changed over the years: at the start his cartoons would be driven to the train station by his wife, taken on the last train to London, where it would then be taken by courier to the offices of the newspaper or magazine. Then, when fax machines came in, you weren’t sure that what you were sending would actually go to the right place, so sometimes people would be looking all around the place for things he’d sent through.
Much more recently, he mentioned how, with a cut-off date of 21:30, he’d been asked 10 minutes beforehand to redo a cartoon. He obliged, sent it through digitally — and by the time he’d tidied up his stuff and gone downstairs, there was his cartoon on the front page of the “tomorrow’s newspaper front pages” section of the TV news!
How times change.
You Are Not So Smart (YANSS) is a great podcast, and one of the recent episodes is right up my street. Based around this paper by disinformation researchers, it introduces the notion of _dis_confirmation bias.
Essentially, they did rigorous research in the US which showed that people prefer concordance with their existing belief systems over conformance with truth. I was expecting to hear philosopher W.V. Quine referenced in terms of his metaphor of us having a ‘web of belief’. Those beliefs that are toward the periphery of the web are more easily jettisoned than those nearer the centre, which are core to our identity.
Anyway, it’s a really interesting episode, especially given that most people think the problem is ‘fake news’. That’s half the problem: the other part is getting people to prefer (and share) true news rather than random stuff that happens to cohere with their existing beliefs.
Resistance to truth and susceptibility to falsehood threaten democracies around the globe. The present research assesses the magnitude, manifestations, and predictors of these phenomena, while addressing methodological concerns in past research. We conducted a preregistered study with a split-sample design (discovery sample N = 630, validation sample N = 1,100) of U.S. Census-matched online adults. Proponents and opponents of 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump were presented with fake and real political headlines ahead of the election. The political concordance of the headlines determined participants’ belief in and intention to share news more than the truth of the headlines. This “concordance-over-truth” bias persisted across education levels, analytic reasoning ability, and partisan groups, with some evidence of a stronger effect among Trump supporters. Resistance to true news was stronger than susceptibility to fake news. The most robust predictors of the bias were participants’ belief in the relative objectivity of their political side, extreme views about Trump, and the extent of their one-sided media consumption. Interestingly, participants stronger in analytic reasoning, measured with the Cognitive Reflection Task, were more accurate in discerning real from fake headlines when accurate conclusions aligned with their ideology. Finally, participants remembered fake headlines more than real ones regardless of the political concordance of the news story. Discussion explores why the concordance-over-truth bias observed in our study is more pronounced than previous research suggests, and examines its causes, consequences, and potential remedies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Image: Nijwam Swargiary
‘Degrowth’ is an idea which makes perfect sense in a resource-limited world. Yet the framing remains problematic and doesn’t seem to chime with the current Overton window.
Degrowth’s main argument is that an infinite expansion of the economy is fundamentally contradictory to the finiteness of material resources on Earth. It argues that economic growth measured by GDP should be abandoned as a policy objective. Policy should instead focus on economic and social metrics such as life expectancy, health, education, housing, and ecologically sustainable work as indicators of both ecosystems and human well-being.
I bring this up because of an article I saw in The Verge about ‘Frankenstein’ laptops being created from salvaged parts in India. Done properly, this is degrowth in action: creating value by repurposing e-waste into functional machines. It reminds me of a scene from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope where Luke Skywalker’s uncle purchases R2-D2 and C-3PO from the Jawas, who resell scrap, droids, and technology they salvage from the environment and crashed ships.
One of the reasons Trump wants a deal with Ukraine and has threatened both Canada and Greenland is due to access to minerals. In a high-tariff, protectionist world, degrowth helps us resist tyrants and create economies that are not based on endless growth. Sometimes that number has to stop going up and to the right.
Across India, in metro markets from Delhi’s Nehru Place to Mumbai’s Lamington Road, technicians like Prasad are repurposing broken and outdated laptops that many see as junk. These “Frankenstein” machines — hybrids of salvaged parts from multiple brands — are sold to students, gig workers, and small businesses, offering a lifeline to those priced out of India’s growing digital economy.
[…]
Manohar Singh, the owner of the workshop-slash-store where Prasad works, flips open a refurbished laptop while sitting on a rickety stool. The screen flickers to life, displaying a crisp image. He smiles — a sign that another machine has been successfully revived.
“We literally make them out of scrap! We also take in second-hand laptops and e-waste from countries like Dubai and China, fix them up, and sell them at half the price of a new one,” he explains.
“A college student or a freelancer can get a good machine for INR 10,000 [about $110 USD] instead of spending INR 70,000 [about $800 USD] on a brand-new one. For many, that difference means being able to work or study at all.”
[…]
[M]any repair technicians have no choice but to rely on informal supply chains, with markets like Delhi’s Seelampur — India’s largest e-waste hub — becoming a critical way to source spare parts. Seelampur processes approximately 30,000 tonnes (33,069 tons) of e-waste daily, providing employment to nearly 50,000 informal workers who extract valuable materials from it. The market is a chaotic maze of discarded electronics, where workers sift through mountains of broken circuit boards, tangled wires, and cracked screens, searching for usable parts.
Farooq Ahmed, an 18-year-old scrap dealer, has spent the last four years sourcing laptop components for technicians like Prasad. “We find working RAM sticks, motherboards with minor faults, batteries that still hold charge and sell it to different electronic workshops,” he says. “These parts would end up in a landfill otherwise.”
[…]
Despite the dangers, the demand for Frankenstein systems continues to grow. And as India’s digital economy expands, the need for such affordable technology will only increase. Many believe that integrating the repair sector into the formal economy could bring about a win-win situation, reducing e-waste, creating jobs, and making technology more accessible.
Sources: Wikipedia & The Verge
Image: Kilian Seiler
A few months ago, when we had basically no work on, I grumpily applied for some jobs. I had a couple of interviews, one of which turned into some consultancy work. But I didn’t get any of them, which on the one hand isn’t very validating, but on the other is secretly very relieving.
Aristotle said that you can’t make a decision as to whether someone is ‘happy’ until after they have died. You need to see the full arc. The same is true of employment: how it all ends is an important factor as to whether you were ‘successful’ or ‘enjoyed’ it. I’ve only had two jobs that ended well. This is because of the mantra I have tried to instil in our two teenagers: people can only treat you the way you let them. I’m not sucking up to anyone, and I’m not changing the way that I think, work, and organise my time to fit a corporate ‘system’.
Which brings us to Mike Monteiro’s post. You should read the whole thing, as he weaves in recollections about being left-handed, neurodivergence, and his own career. The parts I’ve picked out here reflect some of my own experience over the past 22 years of (what some may call) a career. Courtesy of Dan Sinker, I have a Marginally Employed patch below my monitor to remind me I chose this because this is the way. For me, anyway.
Very early on in my “career” (LOL) I decided I wasn’t drift compatible with working in large organizations. I just didn’t enjoy it. Which isn’t to say that I can’t work with people, there are people I absolutely love working with. […] I didn’t like working in large organizations because the larger an organization is, the more likely it is to have a certain way of doing things. Which kinda makes sense, because if you have thousands of people doing things that are supposed to be interconnected, you kinda want a process that everyone can follow, or there’s complete chaos. (The fact that most organizations attempt to do this and it still results in complete chaos is also interesting, but we’re not tackling that today.) The larger an organization becomes, the more it needs everyone to work and think the same way. That way, if it loses a worker, it’s that much easier to plug in a new worker. And while that way of working might make sense for the organization, it’s important that we also ask ourselves, as workers, if it’s working for us.
[…]
Since large organizations made me miserable, I decided to spend my career in small little studios, which tend to be a bit more supportive and even gravitate more towards people who don’t spin in the same direction. Possibly because they were all started by people who don’t spin in the same direction. Or at the same speed. Or spin at all.
[…]
I try to be really careful about how I dole out advice to people. There is no system. There is no one way. There’s no guarantee that our brains will take us on the same journey. I’ll tell people about my own experience in doing something. I’ll tell you that we need to get from Point A to Point B. I’ll tell you how I’ve gotten there in the past, which you can use as a frame of reference, if that helps you, but then I want your brain to do its thing. Because your brain is mapping out a totally different landscape than mine is, and that is fascinating.
[…]
The world is full of… people who want to sell you Design Thinking™… and people who want to see everything spin the same way. They want order. They want sameness. But the only sameness they want is for you to be as miserable as they are. And they’re all miserable. They hate you because you’re a threat. You see what they don’t. You feel what they can’t. You can smell colors! You can read the stars. You see the connections that they can’t. You can paint something, with your own hands, that they have to fire up Three Mile Island to even attempt. You can change your body into what you need it to be. You can love who you love.
You don’t fit in.
And that is amazing.
Source: [Mike Monteiro’s Good News](buttondown.com/monteiro/…]
Image: Mulyadi
I’m sharing two articles together here because they help reframe a couple of things which are important to me. One is about political opinions and demographics, the other one is about meat-eating.
Let’s start with political opinions. The ‘received wisdom’ that older people are more conservative is based on a survivorship bias:
One of the abiding realities of our political era is a major generational split anchored on the right by disproportionately conservative seniors and on the left by disproportionately progressive millennials and post-millennials. This is often thought of as a perfectly natural, even inevitable, phenomenon: Young people are adventurous, open to new ways of thinking, and not terribly invested in the status quo, while old folks have time-tested views, assets they want to protect, and a growing fear of the unknown and unfamiliar.
[…]
But it is important to note that some generational disjunctions in political behavior are driven by demography. It’s well understood that millennials are significantly more diverse than prior generations. But there is something else driving the relative homogeneity of seniors: Poorer people are often hobbled by chronic illness, and succumb to premature death.
The other issue is around the common belief that prehistoric humans ate mainly meat. Of course, animal bones last a lot longer than plant grains, so just as we don’t have much physical evidence of wooden structures (as opposed to stone ones) we have a lot more bones than grains to base theories on.
A new archaeological study along the Jordan River, just south of northern Israel’s Hula Valley, sheds new light on the diets of early humans and challenges long-standing assumptions about prehistoric eating habits. The research shows that ancient hunter-gatherers relied heavily on plant foods, especially starchy varieties, as a key energy source. Contrary to the popular belief that early hominids primarily consumed animal protein, the findings reveal a varied plant-based diet that included acorns, cereals, legumes, and aquatic plants.
[…]
The research contradicts the prevailing narrative that ancient human diets were primarily based on animal protein, as suggested by the popular “paleo” diet. Many of these diets are based on the interpretation of animal bones found in archaeological sites, with plant-based foods rarely preserved.
Sources: New Yorker Magazine & SciTechDaily
Image: William Felipe Seccon
I sent Carole Cadwalladr’s latest TED Talk to people this week who may not otherwise understand what’s going on in the US. Big Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Apple are all in the US, and also… let’s not pretend a similar thing couldn’t happen in other countries. We should be ready.
In this post, Elena Rossini points out how “impossibly incongruous” it is that Cadwalladr uses Bluesky and Substack for her online presence, “two centralized services, owned or funded by questionable groups.”
The products and services we use matter. Not only to protect ourselves, our friends, and our families, but also in terms of resisting a dominant narrative and worldview. I saw that Matt Jukes recently added a colophon to his blog to explain not only his process of writing but the products he uses. I like that.
Carole Cadwalladr has my utmost admiration. The fiery presentation she gave at TED is not diminished by the tech stack she personally uses. I firmly believe everyone should watch her video - it’s digital literacy 101.
Still, I believe that if even Carole Cadwalladr - who recognizes the problem (the broligarchy) and speaks so eloquently against it - is ONLY using American VC-funded Big Tech platforms, her presence there is an implicit endorsement. And her audience will get the indirect message that compromises need to be made and it’s no big deal to use Broligarchs’ platforms because they may be the only solution to get one’s message out there.
[…]
When I learned about the doubling down by Substack founders - who refused to moderate or demonetize newsletters promoting hate speech - I moved away from the platform… and I unsubscribed from 40+ newsletters hosted there (including two paid newsletters). I admire Cadwalladr’s work and I would love to do a paid subscription to her blog - but I won’t as long as she’s on Substack. I am sure there are many people who feel the same way.
[…]
If I were her, I would set up a blog/newsletter on Ghost - with paid membership - and I would keep a Substack account, taking advantage of the Notes feature to share articles hosted on her hypothetical Ghost blog. The best of both worlds.
For social media, I would create an account on the Fediverse and use a tool like Buffer or Fedica to crosspost to multiple accounts.
[…]
I just think that people who write about technology should have a disclaimer about the tech stack they use - in order to see if they’re “walking the talk.” And if people who speak truth to power feel they need to be on VC-backed, centralized, for-profit social networks, sure no problem. But I believe that anyone speaking up against the broligarchy should be active on the Fediverse too - a galaxy of independent, free, open source networks that is not funded by billionaires or crypto bros.
Source: Elena Rossini
Image: Marija Zaric
There’s a growing movement in the communities of which I’m part to move off US infrastructure and away from US-owned companies. For obvious reasons. This browser extension is a good example of how that is being facilitated, by suggesting European alternatives.
Suggests European website alternatives to non-European websites.
This extension is the solution to becoming more European oriented. The extension provides European alternatives for the most used websites and services around the world wide web.
Key features:
- Site Detection and Notifications
- Automatically recognizes websites that have European alternatives
- Badge counter shows the number of alternatives sites
- Receive unobtrusive notifications about available alternatvies
- Clean, modern UI with information about each alternatives
- One-Click access to visit suggested sites
Source: Go European
Back in about 2014, I remember Matt Thompson help bring in ‘heartbeats’ to the Mozilla Foundation. As he explained in this post for opensource.com a couple of years later, using that word instead of ‘sprint’ is useful because:
Heartbeats can create a great sense of purpose, and ebb and flow in your team. They can be set to any length—a week, two weeks, a month. It’s really just about bringing people together in a regular, predictable cycle, with a ritual and set of dance steps to ensure everyone’s on the same page, headed in the right direction, and learning and accomplishing important things together.
I was reminded of Matt’s work when I saw Steve Messer’s post about helping a GOV.UK team implement a new model for agile delivery. Similarly, he points out that you don’t need to do two-week sprints.
This is something that Laura and I have been discussing on a project we started last month with a new client. There’s an expectation these days that to work in an ‘agile’ way you have to do sprints. You can use them. But you don’t have to.
Traditional two-week sprints and Scrum provide good training wheels for teams who are new to agile, but those don’t work for well established or high performing teams.
For research and development work (like discovery and alpha), you need a little bit longer to get your head into a domain and have time to play around making scrappy prototypes.
For build work, a two-week sprint isn’t really two weeks. With all the ceremonies required for co-ordination and sharing information – which is a lot more labour-intensive in remote-first settings – you lose a couple of days with two-week sprints.
Sprint goals suck too. It’s far too easy to push it along and limp from fortnight to fortnight, never really considering whether you should stop the workstream. It’s better to think about your appetite for doing something, and then to focus on getting valuable iterations out there rather than committing to a whole thing.
Source: Boring Magic
Image: Matt Collamer
I’ve always been a bit uneasy about the above meme (to which I’ve added a red cross). Thankfully, due to link to a blog post by Rob Farrow I’ve discovered why. In fact, it’s possibly the reason why the whole DEI thing has been so contentious.
It shouldn’t need saying, but people don’t read carefully and aren’t used to reading beyond headlines these days. So before continuing of course I believe in equality. The issue is with the woolly concept of ‘equity’. The article I’m citing is by Joseph Heath, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He writes as you’d expect such a person to write: clearly, but assuming a bit of a background in Philosophy. Thankfully, yours truly does have that background and is here to help 😉
The purpose of any good model is to present a simplified representation of reality, in order to accentuate crucial features and make them more analytically tractable. The question, therefore, is whether the kids on boxes provide a useful model for thinking about the sorts of distribution problems that arise in DEI contexts. Most egalitarian philosophers, I think, would say that it is a bad model.
I’ve taken the quotations out of order because the overall argument makes more sense when presented this way. So we start from the position that the kids on boxes meme isn’t particularly useful.
The contrast that is drawn in the meme, which was originally intended to illustrate the distinction between “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome,” captures the way that people used to think about issues of equality up until the late 1960s, before the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971. After that, pretty much everyone came to agree that the opportunity/outcome distinction was neither useful nor coherent. The really important question was not when one chose to equalize, but rather what one intended to equalize.
So we need to figure out what we’re ‘equalising’ here. Is it the number of boxes? Or the quality of view?
The most immediate problem with the meme is that it does not present an accepted definition of the term “equity,” but rather a stipulative redefinition, which does not correspond very well to how the term has historically been used… [T]he graphic was originally drawn to illustrate the contrast between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Later on, after it was reproduced umpteen times, someone changed the labels, and somehow the idea that “equality of outcome” should be called “equity” stuck.
To recap: we’ve got an outdated notion of ‘equality of opportunity’ vs ‘equality of outcome’ which has been made even more problematic by the meme relabelling the latter as ‘equity’. It’s not a defensible philosophical position, partly because ‘equity’ doesn’t have a universally accepted definition, and is usually seen as a looser standard that strict equality.
My suspicion is that when DEI ideas were first taking shape, people gravitated toward “equity” language precisely because it had this looseness about it. Because people are different (i.e. diverse), one should not expect perfect equality, but rather just equity. And for all I know, this may have been what the person who modified the kids on boxes meme was thinking, suggesting that the allocation of boxes to kids should be responsive to the different characteristics of the kids. The unfortunate result, however, is that instead of introducing a looser standard of equality, the meme wound up saddling DEI with a commitment to an extremely strict, controversial conception of equality (i.e. equality of outcome), which no reasonable person actually endorses as a general principle. Furthermore, this was not achieved through argument, but merely through persuasive definition.
And this, dear reader, is why Philosophy is such an important subject. If you don’t get these kinds of things right, then it has downstream implications. ‘Equity’ might seem like a reasonable thing to aim for, but if you don’t know what it means, then you’re going to run into trouble.
Setting aside these terminological issues and focusing on equality of outcome, the next big problem with the meme is that it commits DEI proponents to a conception of equality that is somewhere to the left of the most left-wing view defended by left-wing philosophers. Indeed, one of the major objectives of theorists in the “equality of what?” debate was to reformulate egalitarianism in such a way as to avoid the obvious objections to the simple-minded conception of equality of outcome that used to prevail in public debates (and that is represented nicely in the meme).
The ‘obvious objections’ mentioned above are things like people who have made poor choices in life. For example, intuitively, we don’t think that people who have made poor choices in life should be treated the same as those who have wound up with less because of circumstances beyond their control.
[Philosophers] took the choice/circumstance distinction and turned it into the fundamental justification for egalitarianism, arguing that our most basic reason for caring about equality is our desire to neutralize the effects of bad luck. According to this view, when we look at the kids on boxes meme and agree to take the box away from the tall guy and give it to the short kid, the reason we make this judgment is because height is an unchosen characteristic – it’s not the short kid’s fault that he’s short. The idea is not that everyone should get exactly the same outcome, but that we should not be allowing unchosen differences between persons to determine outcomes.
Framed like that, DEI would apply across the board, to people who face inequality through no fault of their own. It’s a shame that we took a meme-based approach to policy rather than a philosophical one. But then, we live in 2025 where only a small proportion of people are willing to take a nuanced view.
You don’t have to agree with this idea to see that it represents a very different way of thinking about equality. And from this perspective, the problem with the meme is that it dredges up an old, discredited view of equality, that can easily be undermined just by pointing to cases where individuals wind up with less because of choices they have made. A lot of the excitement generated by luck egalitarianism was based on the perception that we had overcome a significant error in thinking about equality, and could now move on to discussion of more defensible conceptions. And yet all it took was a single meme to turn back the clock by 50 years!
Source: In Due Course
Image: Modified from an original used in the above blog post.
We live in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, especially for men. A recent Harvard Business Review article showed the difference between what people said they were using AI for this year, and compared to 2025.
“Generating ideas” has gone from first to sixth place, and “Therapy/companionship” has moved from second to first place. “Finding purpose” is a new use case coming straight in at third. There’s a paywall on the HBR article, so you can find the report here. Note that this was, in the words of the author, Marc Zao-Sanders, “a rigorous, expert-driven curation of public discourse, sourced primarily from Reddit forums.” No methodology is provided.
That being said, I’m using the report by way of introduction to the following extract from an article by Jay Springett, who reckons soon everybody will be talking to their car. I mean, I already talk to my Polestart 2 as it has Google Assistant built in, but he means talking in a deep and meaningful way.
For me, this is a case of not if, but when. It’s going to challenge notions of privacy, but also intimacy, infidelity, and loss (when providers inevitably shut down a service).
Consider the average American commuter: 60 minutes a day, mostly alone, in the car. The vehicle as liminal space. Neither home nor work. Private and intimate. I’m 100% positive people are going to talk to their cars. First for fun. Then for directions. Then about their lives. Their feelings. Their grief, their divorce.
And now that OpenAI has also introduced Memory (at least in the US) the car might remember everything you’ve ever told it. 😬
There’s a meaning crisis going on, which means there is a gaping emotional void waiting to be filled by a good listener that’s found in the safety of a car. Some people, especially men, already love their cars. What happens when the car appears to care for them back?
Her becomes a lot more plausible when the AI you fall in love with is also a car.
Source: thejaymo
Image: (shared by various people on LinkedIn)
It’s long, so I’ve provided a proportionally-long excerpt, but it really is worth taking the time to read this article by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about “end times fascism.” It’s a worldview that is simultaneously conspiratorial, eschatological, and profoundly anti-democratic.
I’m glad I don’t live in the USA at the moment, but I think we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t think that this kind of worldview isn’t aiming to capture a country like the UK soon. Carving up the world into multiple oligarchies suits rich people just fine. And the world can burn so long as they have air conditioning and a rocket ride outta here.
Inspired by a warped reading of the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.
[…]
The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
[…]
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn
[…]
Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared. The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon switches to hawking his advertisers’ products. Buy Birch Gold, Bannon tells his audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My Patriot Supply. Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).
Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic.
[…]
As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.
[…]
Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.
So, er, what do we do about all this?
First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.
Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.>
We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take. […]
To have a hope of combating the end times fascists […] we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Arctic Qu
Yesterday, as happens on a regular basis, there was an update to Tails, “the amnesiac incognito live system.” I mention this because much of our digital life is online, and many of the systems we use are not only hostile to users, but are backed by organisations with links to authoritarian regimes and surveillance capitalism.
If I was travelling to China, the US, or Russia, or indeed was a citizen of countries with authoritarian tendencies, this would be what I’d be using to cover my back. As Cardinal Richelieu famously said, “Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him." These days, our digital footprint gives people with a grudge, an axe to grind, or a particular agenda, _much_more than “six lines”. Protect yourself proactively.
To use Tails, shut down the computer and start on your Tails USB stick instead of starting on Windows, macOS, or Linux. You can temporarily turn your own computer into a secure machine. You can also stay safe while using the computer of somebody else.
Tails always starts from the same clean state and everything you do disappears automatically when you shut down Tails.
Tails includes a selection of applications to work on sensitive documents and communicate securely. All the applications are ready-to-use and are configured with safe defaults to prevent mistakes.
Everything you do on the Internet from Tails goes through the Tor network. Tor encrypts and anonymizes your connection by passing it through 3 relays. Relays are servers operated by different people and organizations around the world.
Tor prevents someone watching your Internet connection from learning what you are doing on the Internet. You can avoid censorship because it is impossible for a censor to know which websites you are visiting.
Tor also prevents the websites that you are visiting from learning where and who you are, unless you tell them. You can visit websites anonymously or change your identity. Online trackers and advertisers won’t be able to follow you around from one website to another anymore.
All the code of our software is public to allow independent security researchers to verify that Tails really works the way it should.
Nobody should have to pay to be safe while using a computer. That is why we are giving out Tails for free and try to make it easy to use by anybody. Tails is made by the Tor Project, a global nonprofit developing tools for online privacy and anonymity.
Source & image: Tails
I’m working on an AI Literacy project with the BBC at the moment. I haven’t given many details of this anywhere, as they need to socialise internally that the work is happening first. But I’m really enjoying getting my teeth back into the new literacies space.
For years now, I’ve included in my presentations the fact that when you define ‘literacy’ you’re making a power move. You’re either explicitly or implicitly saying what counts as “literate behaviour.”
That’s why I’m in agreement with James O’Hagan’s position in this article. It chimes the point I made earlier this week about it being a good thing that young people are using AI for their own ends. They need a space to push back at simple ‘compliance training’ on how to use tools, to develop critical AI Literacies (plural!)
There is a reason why the dominant models of AI literacy being promoted to schools feel so hollow. They focus on functionality, not freedom. They train students to use the tools, not challenge the systems. They offer guardrails, not agency.
In one of my Medium pieces, I argued that we are designing AI literacy to make education compliant, not smarter. That is still the case. What often gets labeled “AI education” is really just exposure — watching a tool work, seeing a demo, reading a definition. For example, I completed all five MagicSchool AI certification courses in under 15 minutes — without ever logging in or using the platform. That says more about the training than it does about the tool.
Very little of this equips students to intervene. To resist. To build differently.
We need AI literacy that makes students dangerous thinkers, not docile users.
[…]
Let students ask who funds the tools. Who sets the limits. Who benefits. Let them critique the platforms that shape their school day. Let them design alternatives rooted in their experiences. And let us stop pretending that integration is progress if the terms are dictated from the outside.
We can — and must — teach the technical. But we should not stop there. We need to lift the hood, yes. But we also need to ask why the engine was built in the first place, who it leaves behind, and where it refuses to go.
The way we talk about AI in education will shape the way we teach it. If we treat it like magic, we will mystify. If we treat it like software, we will standardize. But if we treat it like a political, social, and ethical terrain, we will start to give students the tools to navigate it — and challenge it.
Source: James O’Hagan
Dan Sinker uses this blog post to discuss US politics and the systematic dismantling of important infrastructure. But I’m interested in the wider framing of understanding that you can take things apart, literally and figuratively. As Steve Jobs said, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
Most everything I know, I know because I took something apart.
I mean that literally: I’ve cut and I’ve unscrewed and I’ve pried and I’ve desoldered to get inside electronics and appliances. And I mean it figuratively: I read the source code for web pages to build my own, I’ve deconstructed writing to make myself better at it, I’ve mapped entire audio stories with pen and paper to understand how to assemble them myself.
If I want to really understand something, I have to understand all the pieces that went into making it come together.
[…]
Everything can be taken apart, and every step of the process is an opportunity to learn.
The world is a built environment, and I think understanding how it was built is key to being able to truly live in it.
Source: Dan Sinker
Image: KAT
Adam Procter sent me this video which explains the ‘squeeze out’ that’s been happening over the last 30 years or so. It happens in five stages:
Like Cory Doctorow’s three stages of enshittification it’s a useful overview of a process that would otherwise be difficult to pin down. Is it 100% accurate everywhere and all of the time? No, probably not, but it’s a useful framing.
Given the absolute destruction of the world and dismantling of civil society that’s happening at the moment, I’m a little bit less reticent to state that I’m an anarchist. Not like the ridiculous caricature of anarchists as terrorists and in books like The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton (which is otherwise an enjoyable novel). Nor am I out there actively fermenting trouble. But that broadly libertarian socialist angle is my starting position for understanding how the world should be.
If there was ever a time to be reading more revolutionary stuff, it’s now. So I’m pointing you towards Crimethinc. “a rebel alliance—a decentralized network pledged to anonymous collective action—a breakout from the prisons of our age.”
The future may hold neoliberal immiseration, nationalist enclaves, totalitarian command economies, or the anarchist abolition of property itself—it will probably include all of those—but it will be increasingly difficult to preserve the illusion that any government could solve the problems of capitalism for any but a privileged few. Fascists and other nationalists are eager to capitalize on this disillusionment to promote their own brands of exclusionary socialism; we should not smooth the way for them by legitimizing the idea that the state could serve working people if only it were properly administered.
[…]
Rather than seeking state power, we can open up spaces of autonomy, stripping legitimacy from the state and developing the capacity to meet our needs directly. Instead of dictatorships and armies, we can build worldwide rhizomatic networks to defend each other against anyone who wants to wield power over us. Rather than looking to new representatives to solve our problems, we can create grassroots associations based in voluntary cooperation and mutual aid. In place of state-managed economies, we can establish new commons on a horizontal basis. This is the anarchist alternative, which could have succeeded in Spain in the 1930s had it not been stomped out by Franco on one side and Stalin on the other.
[…]
As the crises of our era intensify, new revolutionary struggles are bound to break out. Anarchism is the only proposition for revolutionary change that has not sullied itself in a sea of blood. It’s up to us to update it for the new millennium, lest we all be condemned to repeat the past.
Source: Crimethinc.
A couple of months ago, a report that Laura and I wrote for Friends of the Earth was published. Focusing on AI and environmental justice, in collaboration with experts and campaigners, we came up with seven principles:
That third point is really important, and as this article shows, merely fining tech companies isn’t enough.
Apparently, Elon Musk’s company xAI is using methane-burning gas turbines to fuel over a data centre at a site in Tennessee. As the generators are classed as ‘portable’ they can be used for up to 364 days. At the time of writing, xAI only has permits for the use of 15 generators, but they’re currently using 35. That’s terrible for the environment.
The proximity of powerful tech companies to right-wing authoritarianism is one of the reasons we ended up with the Holocaust. In a recent newsletter, Audrey Watters pointed to this article where the authors introduce the TESCREAL bundle (“transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism”). They consider these beliefs to be “direct descendants of first-wave eugenics.” Plenty of concepts to look up there, but the TL;DR is that “much of the billionaire funding for projects focused on AGI comes from wealthy individuals aligned or explicitly affiliated with one or more of these ideologies.”
Last year it turned out that Elon Musk’s xAI had to install additional ‘portable’ generators near its facility adjacent to Memphis, Tennessee, to power the Colossus supercomputer with over 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs as local power grid could not support the load. The Southern Environmental Law Center contends the generators are “illegal,” yet they can keep running, reports The Guardian.
[…]
The law center stated in a letter that these generators are a major pollution source and breach federal air quality rules, including emissions of hazardous and cancer-causing substances. They demanded that the local health agency issue an emergency halt to the operations and fine the company $25,000 for every day it continues to run them without proper authorization.
That’s a rather laughable fine, frankly. The 100,000 H100 GPUs in the xAI Colossus would cost about $2.5 billion on their own — never mind the rest of the data center infrastructure and hardware. $25,000 per day would amount to just $9.1 million per year. Providing 150MW of electricity, 24/7, on the other hand, even at a price of $0.05 per kWh (we’re not sure what xAI pays to run the portable generators) would be about $180,000 per day.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
Image: Logan Voss
I enjoyed reading this blog post from Simon Wolf, who, in his fifties, has decided to change his lifestyle and become fitter. He seems to have been prompted by thoughts about his own mortality, and discovering the YouTuber Ryan Condon who halved his weight from 190kg to 95kg by walking, running, and cycling.
Simon talks about three things: the gear required (get decent running shoes!), the technology he uses to track his exercise, but — perhaps most importantly — the mental side of things. That’s not just “getting out there” and having the motivation to do something, but getting over ourselves thinking that people are paying more attention to us than they actually are.
Having been active most of my life, it’s only very recently that I’ve struggled with this. My recent heart condition has meant that I’ve only this week run outside again for the first time in about three months. Of course, I’m running a lot slower than I used to, and virtually walking up hills, which made me a bit self-conscious.
But of course nobody cares. I’m just another middle-aged guy moving past people’s fleeting consciousness. Even if they do recognise me, at least I’m out there, trying.
As someone who is new to exercise and who is very self-aware about their lack of fitness and ability, just stepping out of my front door to go and do the first session was intimidating. What if people laugh at me? What if I can’t do any of it and give up after a few minutes? What if I can’t run at all? What happens if I see someone I know? The doubts go on and on. But I had picked a day, the 31st of March, and I was determined to stick to it. Worse case, I could pretend that I was out for a walk in some slightly unusual clothing for me.
So at around 6pm I walked up to the recreation field in the village where I live. The warm-up is a walk so this was fine. And the field was largely empty apart from a few young children playing and a joyous sight… someone doing some intermittent walking and running which was very possibly someone else doing Couch to 5K. Suddenly it all felt a bit more possible. But even without that I was remembering the words that “doing something is better than doing nothing” and I was indeed doing something and I felt empowered by it.
In the four sessions I have done since then I have had two where the field was essentially empty, one where some ladies walking their dogs asked me what I was doing (it’s incredibly hard to politely reply whilst still walking briskly), and one where the field was part-filled with a kids football club and, inevitably, their parents all watching. But I walked and ran regardless and nobody shouted anything at me and after a little while I zoned them all out and just got on with what I was doing. I survived and it didn’t put me off doing it all again. In fact, this week I was a bit sad that I’d done my run a little earlier and missed my, presumably appreciative, audience.
Source: Simon Wolf’s Blog
Image: Marcel Ardivan
This week I attended a STEPS Collective monthly meetup where the topic was Money. It was a really well-run session by Esther Hayes Grossman and included the first example I’ve seen of people silently voting on a topic by turning on their video in response to a prompt.
During the discussion, one participant shared details of ‘De Warren’ in Amsterdam as an example of something that “makes no sense” to real estate people because there’s no profit motive involved. It made me think how interesting it would be to live in such a space — check out that ‘Macchu Picchu’ stairway!
Having lived on a small row of terraced houses for nine years prior to moving to where we currently live, what I miss are the serendipitous moments of bumping into neighbours and having a chat in the shared back lane. I think we all need more of that in our lives, to build solidarity. It’s all well and good thinking about online social spaces, but we are embodied, social creatures.
At the De Warren newbuild by a housing cooperative on the outskirts of Amsterdam, 36 affordable rental apartments and about 800 m² of communal space are hidden behind the facades of reclaimed wood.
[…]
The architects determined the building’s spatial programme with the members of the cooperative in four workshops. Thirty percent of the space in the house – i.e. about 800 m² – is set aside for communal rooms distributed on all storeys.
[…]
The building’s collage-like facades differ it quite considerably from its neighbours. The outer cladding in reclaimed wood is just the most visible characteristic of a comprehensive sustainability concept. This includes 30-m ground piles to which piping has been added, meaning they thus serve as geothermal heat exchangers for the heat pump that supplies the house with heat. The electricity for the heating is provided by a photovoltaic panel array on the roof. Altogether the building has an EPC rating of 0,16 according to Dutch energy regulations and is thus “energy-positive”.
The glazed lounge at the corner of the building marks the start of a continual staircase – called the Macchu Picchu stairway by the architects – that connects the numerous communal spaces scattered through the house, such as the children’s playroom, a music studio, several co-working offices, a meditation room, a shared roof terrace with greenhouses and several communal kitchens.
Source: DETAIL
While the rest of Team Belshaw was doing such novel things as socialising, working, and watching TV on Friday night I decided to break out my microphone and record a solo podcast episode. Weighing in at around 20 minutes, I couldn’t in all honesty call it a ‘microcast’, so I ended up publishing using Spotify’s creator tools.
Yes, there’s an RSS feed. Is this something I want to do regularly? Is it something people want to hear? I don’t know. Perhaps I need a CONTENT STRATEGY. (I do not need a content strategy.)
Someone shared a link to this Instagram video in which the person on the video claims:
A friend’s daughter fed her mom’s voice to AI and then used it to get out of school to hang with her friends. She also used it to have her friends sleepover. We are absolutely cooked.
I applaud this novel use of technology by the girl. It’s not much different to my son trying to forge my signature so that I didn’t find out about his detention.
Or, indeed, me using my dad’s credit card in 1996 when I wasn’t allowed on the internet. I started sequential month-long trials with Compuserve and AOL, going to the phone box at the end of the street to call the company, pretend to be my dad, and cancel the accounts.
Yes, I get that all of this AI stuff makes it easier to scam people, but then technology has always been an arms race. Knowing how to look for the signs of what’s real and what’s fake is, therefore, a part of AI Literacy.
Great stuff from Dan Meyer here. Even if he is representing an edtech company, he’s got more integrity in his little fingernail than many vendors.
I’m telling you, everybody, the problems stay the same. Every year, every decade, every new technology, the problems stay the same.
Figure out how to get along. Figure out how to share the surplus of what we build. Figure out who needs what and why they don’t have it. Figure out how to help people see that we see their value. No technology will ever change any of these unalterable challenges of human existence.
And I get it, they’re hard. It’s work. It’s also life. It’s the work of a lifetime. And I get why many people want a technological cheat code, an easy button, a rapture. But none’s coming. We’re stuck with us, people, the cause and solution of all of our problems. And new technologies can play a part, but only if we start with what people need. Teachers and students need content, sure, but especially connection.
The rapture is not something we wait for. It’s something we do.
Source: YouTube
I’m a Xennial who identifies much more with Millennial culture than with Gen X. In his new column for VICE, Drew Austin (of Kneeling Bus fame) talks about the end of Millennial culture coinciding with us coming out blinking from pandemic-induced lockdowns.
It’s a fair point. I’m 44 and the youngest Millennials are around 30 years old. Popular culture belongs to people in their teens and twenties, mostly, which means that what we thought was cool and hip is now old and stale. I quite enjoyed reading this on my sticker-covered laptop while listening to music from the early 2000s on my iPod HiFi. One could say I’m comfortably settling into the second half of my life.
The monuments that have endured also attest to the generation’s decline. The electric scooter boom of the late 2010s—arguably the millennials’ swan song, and an exemplary symbol of their distinctive culture—produced a strange but predictable side effect: piles of discarded and destroyed Bird and Lime scooters littering embankments and ponds and other marginal urban spaces. The literal trashing of these whimsical avatars of the millennial economy, documented in an Instagram account called Bird Graveyard, was also a fitting metaphor for the eventual state of so many other millennial artifacts: expired but still visible, scattered throughout the urban environment, persistent reminders of an embarrassing recent past. Today, these proverbial junk piles contain more than just scooters, but also IPAs, escape rooms, listicles, smash burgers, Garden State, MySpace, brunch, @shitmydadsays, tight jeans, sans serif fonts, life hacks, axe throwing bars, Williamsburg, speakeasies, Urban Outfitters, electroclash, fast casual bowls, food trucks, food delivery apps, ridesharing apps, laundry apps—apps for every conceivable action—and even 44th US President Barack Obama himself. Much of this remains permanently embedded in the landscape. No longer fresh, it’s now just the mundane infrastructure of everyday life. What IPAs do you guys have on draft?
[…]
Every month, it seems, there’s a new thinkpiece about how millennials are washed, usually written by millennials themselves (including this one, I suppose)—but the generation seems unconvinced by its own self-deprecating argument. “Millennials’ ability to drive a cycle of discourse around our age means we can still shape the conversation,” Bernstein writes. “For millennials who criticized their boomer parents for decades for not shuffling off the stage, the ‘look how old we are’ act may serve another purpose: prolonging our own time in the spotlight, and our own sense that we are the protagonists of history.”
This kind of navel-gazing, of course, has always been a millennial hallmark. Millennials invented social media and were immediately its most dedicated users, becoming the first generation who could expect their own audience regardless of how exceptional they were, and the first to enjoy a forum where they could process their neuroses and insecurities in public. One could hardly expect millennials to bow out gracefully after 20 years of such preening online; talking is what they do best, and it’s becoming clear they’ll still be doing it when no one else is listening.
[…]
One of the emergent qualities of the digital culture millennials shaped is that nothing ends any more. Wars and pandemics drag on; aging bands keep touring in a perpetual state of reunion rather than breaking up; politicians circle the drain into their eighties and nineties; bygone aesthetics and styles are forgotten and rediscovered in shorter and shorter cycles. We seem unable to fully metabolize experiences and move on, for better or worse; we suffer from cultural acid reflux.
The paradox of the internet is that it enables this endlessness while also making culture less durable and more disposable. Millennials, again, were the first generation to bank a large share of their cultural capital online, which now seems to guarantee its swift erasure. As the generation’s Obama-era heyday recedes farther into the past, its most significant accomplishments feel increasingly elusive, hazy, out of reach, or just illegible, revealing the digital ground it all stood upon to be an unstable foundation. The rewards for millennials’ technological adventurousness have been obvious—wealth, attention, convenience, abundance of all kinds—with the drawbacks mostly becoming evident only later. And one of these drawbacks is ephemerality: The millennials’ curse is to have built their castles on sand, to see their contributions begin fading as quickly as they once appeared, to leave no lasting proof of their erstwhile relevance. The cultural significance that was attainable in the 20th century has itself become a casualty of the internet. All those moments lost in time, like tears in rain.
Source: VICE
Image: Kenny Eliason
As I’ve long suspected, researchers have found evidence that patience is not a virtue, but rather a coping strategy.
TL;DR: you’re more likely to be impatient when stuck in a particularly unpleasant state, when you want to reach an intended goal, and when someone is clearly to blame for the frustration.
So now you know.
Each hypothetical situation came in two versions, with one designed to provoke high levels of impatience, and the other only low levels. In one story, for example, the participant was asked to imagine that they were watching a film in a cinema and a child nearby was being noisy. In the ‘low impatience’ version of this scenario, the parents were doing everything they could to calm the child, while in the other, they were described as doing nothing. In addition to this, participants also completed a range of questionnaires, including a personality test and a measure of their ability to regulate their emotions.
When the team analysed the resulting data, they found three clear predictors of impatience. Participants said that they would feel more impatient when they were stuck in a particularly unpleasant state (waiting for an appointment without a seat, for example); when they particularly wanted to reach their intended goal (when they were on their way to a concert by a band they really wanted to see but were stuck in traffic); and, finally, when someone was clearly to blame for the frustration (in the cinema example, this was when the parents were described as ignoring their noisy child).
These three situation characteristics consistently provoked impatience across different scenarios, the team reports. In the third study, which also asked participants to rate the objectionableness of the situation, they found that those that had any of those three characteristics also got higher objectionableness ratings. Together, these results provide “tentative evidence” the emotion of impatience is prompted by perceiving one of these three characteristics, they write.
However, when the researchers analysed the data on how patient the participants thought they would be in the various scenarios, they found that, in general, these results were linked less to the specific situation and more to variations in individual factors. Specifically, better scores on the measures of impulsivity, emotional awareness and flexibility, and also the personality trait of agreeableness were all linked to higher patience scores.
Source: The British Psychological Society
Image: Uday Mittal
I wouldn’t usually feature one of my own posts on Thought Shrapnel but in this case there’s a couple of good reasons. First, you may not have ever listened to Today In Digital Education (TIDE), a podcast I recorded with my good friend Dai Barnes between 2015 and his tragic passing in 2019. I think you’d enjoy it.
Second, though, you may have been a listener, and somehow still have the audio files for episodes 26 and/or 37. I’m not sure how, but they currently seem lost to the sands of time. If you do have them, could you let me know? I’d love to create a complete archive.
This post is to memorialise and provide an archive for Today In Digital Education (TIDE), a podcast I recorded with my good friend Dai Barnes between 2015 and 2019. It was the second podcast I co-hosted with him, the first being EdTechRoundUp from 2007 to 2011.
[…]
Dai sadly passed away suddenly in his sleep in early August 2019. In the eulogy I gave for Dai at Oundle School, I quoted Terry Pratchett as saying that “No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.” I still miss Dai and know his ripples continue on through many of us.
Source: Open Thinkering
Image: Snappy Shutters
The headline that The Guardian chose to use for this article is “Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer.” I mean, if only.
But, of course, the reality is entirely the opposite way around: capitalism is destroying the climate. The only thing that provides some solace in this article is the realisation that people, organisations, and governments will be unable to get insurance, which will in turn put (positive) pressure on Net Zero targets.
At least, I hope that will be the case. Otherwise we’re going to have a Mad Max-style world on fire with lots of poverty and migration.
The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments.
Global carbon emissions are still rising and current policies will result in a rise in global temperature between 2.2C and 3.4C above pre-industrial levels. The damage at 3C will be so great that governments will be unable to provide financial bailouts and it will be impossible to adapt to many climate impacts, said Thallinger, who is also the chair of the German company’s investment board and was previously CEO of Allianz Investment Management.
The core business of the insurance industry is risk management and it has long taken the dangers of global heating very seriously. In recent reports, Aviva said extreme weather damages for the decade to 2023 hit $2tn, while GallagherRE said the figure was $400bn in 2024. Zurich said it was “essential” to hit net zero by 2050.
[…]
No governments will realistically be able to cover the damage when multiple high-cost events happen in rapid succession, as climate models predict, Thallinger [on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies] said. Australia’s disaster recovery spending has already increased sevenfold between 2017 and 2023, he noted.
[…]
Many financial institutions have moved away from climate action after the election of the US president, Donald Trump, who has called such action a “green scam”. Thallinger said in February: “The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of transformation and adaptation. If we succeed in our transition, we will enjoy a more efficient, competitive economy [and] a higher quality of life.”
Source: The Guardian
Image: Mika Baumeister
This article by Pete Sena is a curious one. On the one hand, he makes some really solid points about ‘vibe coding’ which I’d define as using natural language to create digital artefacts containing code. Most commonly these are web apps, such as the ones I’ve created:
Sena goes on, however, to start talking about ‘craft’, as if somehow lots of people being able to manipulate code is going to destroy the industry. It won’t. There will just a lot more people being able to go from idea to execution quickly.
Does that mean that every vibe coded app will be scalable and secure? Obviously not. But this is the worst the technology is going to be, so buckle up, folks! If you’re interested in a potential course I’m going to offer around all this, you can sign up at vibe.horse.
Vibe coding is also just one more example of what I call the Great Democratization Cycle. We’ve seen it in photography as it evolved from darkrooms to digital cameras, which eliminated film processing, to smartphones and Instagram filters, making everyone a high-end “photographer.” The same goes for publishing (from printing presses to WordPress), video production (from studio equipment to TikTok), and music creation (from recording studios to GarageBand on a laptop and now AI tools like Suno on your smartphone).
[…]
This AI-driven accessibility is undeniably powerful. Designers can prototype without developer dependencies. Domain experts can build tools to solve specific problems without learning Python. Entrepreneurs can validate concepts without hiring engineering teams.
But as we embrace this new paradigm, we face a profound question: What happens when we separate makers from their materials?
[…]
Consider this parallel: Would we celebrate a world where painters never touch paint, sculptors never feel clay, or chefs never taste their ingredients? Would their art, their craft, retain its soul?
When we remove the intimate connection between creator and medium — in this case, between developer and code — we risk losing something essential: the craft.
[…]
True innovation often emerges from constraints and deep domain knowledge. When you wrestle with a programming language’s limitations, you’re forced to think creatively within boundaries. This tension produces novel solutions and unexpected breakthroughs.
When we remove this friction entirely, we risk homogenizing our solutions. If everyone asks AI for “a responsive e-commerce site with product filtering,” we’ll get variations on the same theme — technically correct but creatively bankrupt implementations that feel eerily similar.
Source: Peter Suna
Image: BoliviaInteligente
I’m a daily, but not uncritical, user of generative AI. One of the particularly problematic uses of the technology is of an objective, neutral, and all-knowing arbiter for decision making.
It’s bad enough doing this on a local level, when not many people are involved. It’s much worse when brought in, say, to the benefits system and of course, much much worse when used (allegedly) to dictate punitive tariffs.
In Taming Silicon Valley, I warned that LLMs would be used for dumb things that would affect lots of people.
I rest my case.
Source & screenshot: Marcus on AI
My wife’s favourite colour is purple. Which, doesn’t really exist — it’s a nonspectral colour. But then, strictly speaking, no colours exist. Phenomenology FTW.
Our eyes can’t see most wavelengths, such as the microwaves used to cook food or the ultraviolet light that can burn our skin when we don’t wear sunscreen. We can directly see only a teeny, tiny sliver of the spectrum — just 0.0035 percent! This slice is known as the visible-light spectrum. It spans wavelengths between roughly 350 and 700 nanometers.
[…]
Although violet is in the visible spectrum, purple is not. Indeed, violet and purple are not the same color. They look similar, but the way our brain perceives them is very different.
[…]
When light enters our eyes, the specific combination of cones it activates is like a code. Our brain deciphers that code and then translates it into a color.
Consider light that stimulates long- and mid-wavelength cones but few, if any, short-wavelength cones. Our brain interprets this as orange. When light triggers mostly short-wavelength cones, we see blue or violet. A combination of mid- and short-wavelength cones looks green. Any color within the visible rainbow can be created by a single wavelength of light stimulating a specific combination of cones.
[…]
In the middle of the rainbow — colors like green and yellow — the mid-wavelength cones are busiest, with help from both long- and short-wavelength cones. At the blue end of the spectrum, short-wavelength cones do most of the work.
But there is no color on the spectrum that’s created by combining long- and short-wavelength cones.
[…] Purple is a mix of red (long) and blue (short) wavelengths. Seeing something that’s purple… stimulates both short- and long-wavelength cones. This confuses the brain. […]
To cope, the brain improvises. It takes the visible spectrum — usually a straight line — and bends it into a circle. This puts blue and red next to each other.
[…]
Colors that are part of the visible spectrum are known as spectral colors. It only takes one wavelength of light for our brain to perceive shades of each color. Purple, however, is a nonspectral color. That means it’s made of two wavelengths of light (one long and one short).
Source: ScienceNewsExplores
Image: Luke Chesser
I was all ready to summarise a post about an internet of many autonomous communities, but what really caught my eye was an article the author links to from 2017.
I’ve already referenced Episode #324 (“What’s Good for the Goose”) of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense podcast this week, and will do so again in relation to this. We’re entering a point in history where the assumptions made at the founding of nation states are being challenged by the digital technologies that allow instant communication between continents.
Ada Palmer is a novelist and historian, whose award-winning Terra Ignota series explores a future of borderless nations. If we stop and think for a moment, those who work from home and don’t have much of a geo-specific social life (🙋), can already choose to live quite differently to their neighbours. I can only seeing that becoming even more the case over time.
What if citizenship wasn’t something we’re born with, but something we choose when we grow up? In the Terra Ignota future, giant nations called “Hives” are equally distributed all around the world, so every house on a block, and even every person in a house, gets to choose which laws to live by, and which government represents that individual’s views the most. It’s an extension into the future of the many diasporas which already characterize our present, since increasingly easy transportation and communication mean that families, school friends, social groups, ethnic groups, language groups, and political parties are already more often spread over large areas than residing all together. In this future each of those groups can be part of one self-governing nation, with laws that fit their values, even while all living spread over the same space.
Source & image: The Reactor
I discovered this post by Dougald Hine via Warren Ellis, which in turn links to Anu’s exhortation to ‘make something heavy’.
The identification of people being ‘pre-heavy thing’ or ‘post-heavy thing’ is an interesting concept. Perhaps I need to think about my next heavy thing?
If something is heavy, we assume it matters. And often, it does. Weight signals quality, durability, presence, permanence.
[…]
We accept this in the physical world.
But online, we forget.
[…]
The modern makers’ machine does not want you to create heavy things. It runs on the internet—powered by social media, fueled by mass appeal, and addicted to speed. It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production.
It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter. (Make slop if you have too.) Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax. And so, we oblige—everyone does. We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing.
[…]
Creation isn’t just about output. It’s a process of becoming. The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. A founder builds a startup to prove they can. A writer wrestles an idea into clarity. You don’t just create heavy things. You become someone who can.
[…]
At any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing. You’ve either made something weighty already, or you haven’t. Pre–heavy thing people are still searching, experimenting, iterating. Post–heavy thing people have crossed the threshold. They’ve made something substantial—something that commands respect, inspires others, and becomes a foundation to build on. And it shows. They move with confidence and calm. (But this feeling doesn’t always last forever.)
Source: Working Theorys
Image: Keagan Henman
As I’ve seen other post about, there’s no easy way to calculate the impact and lost value of the research that won’t be done, the breakthroughs that won’t be made, and the collaborations that won’t happen as a result of the oligarchy currently taking over the US political system.
In this post, Prof. Christina Pagel gives just one small example of the self-censorship ‘just in case’ that will be happening everywhere. I didn’t travel to the US last year because it felt like an unsafe to visit; I sure as hell ain’t going this year.
Relatedly, I’d highly recommend listening to Episode #324 (“What’s Good for the Goose”) of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense podcast as it puts current events in a wider context.
A colleague and I would like to write an academic paper on the potential impact of US funding cuts to global health programmes. Our ideal co-author is an international expert newly based in the US, and they would like to do it. But we are all worried that doing so will expose them to the risk of having their academic visa cancelled, being detained and eventually deported - no matter how solid the science and how academic and dry our language. We are especially fearful because they are brown.
My colleagues who have been writing about the new administration, or the situation in Gaza, in academic journals, on substack or on social media are cancelling work trips to the US. I too would not feel safe to go now, given how openly I have criticised the administration. Even a 1% chance of being denied entry or shipped to a detention centre is too high.
When I said these words out loud to my husband today I had to stop for a moment to let it sink in. Foreign scientists in the US are scared to publish anything perceived as critical for fear of being bundled off the street to a detention centre. Foreign scientists abroad are scared to go to the US because they have voiced criticism of the state. The US is actively cracking down on perceived dissenters and foreigners are the most vulnerable to arbitrary detention and lack of due legal process. The vaunted first amendment guaranteeing free speech has become a bitter and twisted joke.
Source: Diving into Data & Decision making
Image: Floris Van Cauwelaert
As I’ve argued many times, including just last week appending ‘literacy’ to a word is an attempt at control. It’s a power move, either intentionally or unintentionally. So, for example, with the work that I’ve been kicking off around AI Literacy recently with the BBC, it’s interesting to see the way that, for example, Big Tech wants to define it compared to, say, academics.
In this post, Jay Springett introduces the term ‘context literacy’ but doesn’t really define what it means. I don’t doubt that what he identifies in the post isn’t a set of important skills and competencies, but is it a ‘literacy’? Is it a way of metaphorically ‘reading’ and ‘writing’? Or is it just a way of understanding and making sense of the world?
I definitely agree that we’re in the midst of another culture war that, perhaps more than ever before, is predicated on a lack of shared context. I’ve started watching the Contrapoints video I shared recently about conspiracism, which I think is very closely related to this.
The Ghibli crisis is just the beginning. Focusing on the outputs alone misses the point.
So how do we respond?
We must recognise that revolution is not over. We are in the Information Age.
We must cultivate context literacy and we must maintain a distinction between the infrastructure and the experience, between machine and meaning.
We are living through a moment that future historians may describe as a cultural rupture. A context war. How this plays out will shape new definitions of truth, authorship, creativity, and trust, perhaps for centuries to come.
The question is not whether this will happen.
It already is.
Source: thejaymo
Ethan Mollick reports on a study last summer with 776 professionals at Procter and Gamble. The findings, pretty obviously, show that working with AI boosts performance, but also that working in teams is just as effective as working with AI. Teams working with AI “were significantly more likely to produce… top-tier solutions.”
What’s interesting to me, though, is the emotional aspect of all this. Unless you’ve done work around, say, nonviolent communication and Sociocracy it’s likely to that you experience regular unprocessed negative emotions around work. Especially if you work in a hierarchical setting.
Generative AI can be particularly good at helping you think more objectively about work — as being something that you have ideas and thoughts about, rather than emotions. At least, it does for me. Note that I definitely think that you should bring your full self to work, it’s just that unhelpful negative emotions can sometimes creep in to our relationships with other humans, especially around the validation (or otherwise) of ideas.
For me, the sweet spot is working with people I know, respect, and trust (i.e. my colleagues at WAO) and using generative AI to augment our collaboration.
A particularly surprising finding was how AI affected the emotional experience of work. Technological change, and especially AI, has often been associated with reduced workplace satisfaction and increased stress. But our results showed the opposite, at least in this case.
People using AI reported significantly higher levels of positive emotions (excitement, energy, and enthusiasm) compared to those working without AI. They also reported lower levels of negative emotions like anxiety and frustration. Individuals working with AI had emotional experiences comparable to or better than those working in human teams.
While we conducted a thorough study that involved a pre-registered randomized controlled trial, there are always caveats to these sorts of studies. For example, it is possible that larger teams would show very different results when working with AI, or that working with AI for longer projects may impact its value. It is also possible that our results represent a lower bound: all of these experiments were conducted with GPT-4 or GPT-4o, less capable models than what are available today; the participants did not have a lot of prompting experience so they may not have gotten as much benefit; and chatbots are not really built for teamwork. There is a lot more detail on all of this in the paper, but limitations aside, the bigger question might be: why does this all matter?
[…]
To successfully use AI, organizations will need to change their analogies. Our findings suggest AI sometimes functions more like a teammate than a tool. While not human, it replicates core benefits of teamwork—improved performance, expertise sharing, and positive emotional experiences. This teammate perspective should make organizations think differently about AI. It suggests a need to reconsider team structures, training programs, and even traditional boundaries between specialties. At least with the current set of AI tools, AI augments human capabilities. It democratizes expertise as well, enabling more employees to contribute meaningfully to specialized tasks and potentially opening new career pathways.
The most exciting implication may be that AI doesn’t just automate existing tasks, it changes how we can think about work itself. The future of work isn’t just about individuals adapting to AI, it’s about organizations reimagining the fundamental nature of teamwork and management structures themselves. And that’s a challenge that will require not just technological solutions, but new organizational thinking.
Source: One Useful Thing
Image: Igor Omilaev
I think the author of this article, Packy McCormick, has essentially discovered “working openly.” But, I guess, the twist is that it’s doing so in a way that makes your ideas accessible and understandable to as many people as possible.
It’s interesting doing this in an age of AI, because (as McCormick) does, you can half-remember something, type it into an LLM, and have it find the thing you’re talking about, with sources, extremely quickly.
If ‘hyperlexic’ describes extraordinary reading ability, then let me propose a complementary word for extraordinary readability: Hyperlegible.
Hyperlegibility defines our current era so comprehensively that I was shocked when I googled the term and found only references to fonts.
[…]
Hyperlegibility emerges with game theoretical certainty from each of our desire to win whatever game it is you’re playing. Certainly, it’s a consequence of playing The Great Online Game. In order for the right people and projects to find you, you must make yourself legible to them. To stand out in a sea of people making themselves legible, you must make yourself Hyperlegible: so easy to read and understand you rise to the top.
Once you become aware of Hyperlegibility, you see it everywhere.
[…]
Hyperlegibility isn’t good or bad. It’s neither and both. But it certainly is. Information used to be the highest form of alpha. Now everyone bends over backwards to leak it.
Through a combination of humanity getting ever-better at reading anything and humans becoming ever-more willing to make themselves legible, information is easier to find and understand than it’s ever been.
Source: Not Boring
Image: Egor Myznik
I use the Switzerland-based service Proton for my personal email and VPN, so news that the Swiss government is considering amending its surveillance law isn’t great news.
It looks like the specific thing they’re targeting is the metadata — i.e. not the content of the message, but where it was sent from and to whom. That’s the kind of information that Meta collects when people use WhatsApp. By way of comparison, Proton is more like Signal messenger in they don’t harvest this kind of metadata.
You might wonder why this is important, but putting together a story based on metadata isn’t exactly difficult. And, as is well-attested, if you have enough metadata, you don’t really need the content of the messages.
Consultations are now public and open until May 6, 2025. Speaking to TechRadar, NymVPN has explained how it’s planning to fight against it, alongside encrypted messaging app Threema and Proton, the provider behind one of the best VPN and secure email services on the market.
Authorities' arguments behind the need for accessing more data are always the same – catching criminals and improving security. Yet, according to Nym’s co-founder and COO, Alexis Roussel, being forced to leave more data behind would achieve the opposite result.
“Less anonymity online is not going to make things better,” he told TechRadar. “For example, enforcing identification of all these small services will eventually push to leaks, more data theft, and more attacks on people.”
[…]
“It’s not about end-to-end encryption. They don’t want to force you to reveal what’s inside the communication itself, but they want to know where it goes,” Roussel explains. “They realize the value is not in what is being said but who you are talking to.”.
“The whole point of security and privacy is not being able to link the usage to the person. That’s the most critical thing.” Roussel told TechRadar.
Source: TechRadar
Image: Arturo A
This is the first post I’ve come across from Paras Chopra, and I love the strapline for his blog: “Be passionate about the territory, not the map.” He’s still young, and the overall philosophy of life he outlines here is a touch naive (reminding me of myself at that age) but nevertheless it’s solid advice.
In most modern cultures, direct coercion doesn’t exist. Nobody can make you work harder than you want to. However, with our infinite algorithmic timelines, we’re immersed with indirect coercion.
But, you do not have to participate in the lottery. You can choose to quit. You can decide to not compete. You can choose to not participate in the lottery, where you’d almost likely lose more than you receive in return.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean inactivity. (Life is a game, where inactivity means death.)
Rather, what this implies is something very simple – don’t confuse what gets social approval with what’s right for you. Social approval exists to attract participants in a game that ultimately benefits the collective at the expense of an individual.
[…]
Once you overcome your desire to compete with others, you can actually just sit back and enjoy the outcomes that others compete to produce for you.
[…]
Let others compete hard to let you enjoy these things, while you do what you find most fun. It could be tending to your garden, working at a sensible pace, making coffee, building tiny weird games, or whatever else makes you come alive.
I hear you ask: won’t society collapse if everyone did this? I’d argue the opposite. If everyone did what they find most fulfilling, our net happiness will rise. Artifacts useful to the society will still be produced, except with less anxiety and burnout. People will still write books, but without an intent of it trying to be a bestseller but with an intent of honing and enjoying their craft.
Source: Inverted Passion
Image: dylan nolte
I know Martin Waller from the early days of Twitter when we were both teachers. The ‘Multi’ part of his ‘MultiMartin’ handle is due to his work on multiliteracies, the subject of his postgraduate study. He’s written plenty of papers and spoken at more than a few events.
Martin dropped off my radar a bit, but on reconnecting with him this week, he pointed me towards this post. I think we’re going to see a lot more of this over the next few years. How would Gwyneth Paltrow put it, “conscious decoupling” from online life, maybe?
I’ve… taken the decision to completely remove myself from social media including most online messaging services. I was once an advocate of the use of social media and digital technologies and have published book chapters and spoken at events around the world about it in education. I have made so many wonderful connections and friends over the years on the internet and through social media. However, things have changed. The landscape and current climate can be toxic and dangerous. I’ve stumbled upon comments on Facebook and Instagram which have made me feel sick. I’ve read different messenger channels where comments have ridiculed people for no good reason. There’s also just too much information out there and it isn’t helpful to be exposed to it all, all of the time. It makes it difficult to switch off, think and focus on what matters.
Source: MultiMartin
Image: Chris Barbalis
There’s a lot of people thinking about endings at the moment. Not just because we’re getting into the post-Covid era now, but also due to things like the huge swathes of layoffs in the US, and the general economic downturn in the UK and other countries.
Things start and things end. That’s what they do. Change is constant, which is something difficult to get used to. In this post, Tom Watson talks about ‘composting’ which is a key part of the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops model, which he doesn’t actually reference but is extremely relevant.
I’d also say working openly helps with having good endings. The chances are that what has been learned during the project can take root elsewhere, and therefore live on, if people can see into the project. We should treat projects less as raised beds for pretty flowers and more like mycelium networks.
I thought about the social enterprise I had with my dad. I’ve got lots of things wrong in life, but doing that definitely wasn’t one of them. I learned a lot, about caring, kindness, not following the bullshit, and community. It ended, like all organisations do. But I was proud that we were able to financially support a group to continue meeting and chatting, and supporting each other. It wasn’t much, but it was something. And just last year we donated the last of our funds, around £6k, to a charity rewilding in Scotland, where the C for Campbell in my name comes from via my dad.
This felt like a good ending. A bit of composting. But not every organisation can pass on finances at the end, in fact it’s pretty rare, because often the root cause of the ending is money. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have things of value to pass on. They have resources, knowledge and wisdom. And I couldn’t help thinking about all that is lost, again and again when things end.
[…]
[W]e need to think broader about endings and composting. Not just when an organisation ends, but when programmes and projects end. What about all the research reports, the data from projects, the experiments that worked and those that didn’t. What about all that knowledge, what about all that potential wisdom. It’s why we spend time up front cataloguing all the things we do in a project along the way. It’s not perfect, but it’s something.
Source: Tomcw.xyz
Image: Innovation Unit
ContraPoints is “an American left-wing YouTuber, political commentator, and cultural critic” with the moniker coming from the fact that her content “often provide[s] counterargument to right-wing extremists and classical liberals.” She “utilizes philosophy and personal anecdotes to not only explain left-wing ideas, but to also criticize common conservative, classical liberal, alt-right, and fascist talking points,” with the videos having “a combative but humorous tone, containing dark and surreal humor, sarcasm, and sexual themes.”
I haven’t watched this yet, partly because I struggle to fit watching videos longer than 10 minutes into my day, and partly because it is absolutely the kind of thing I would watch by myself. The first few minutes are fantastic, I can tell you that much, with the focus being on conspiracy theories and misinformation.
I’m not Very Online™ online enough to be able to understand what’s going on in popular culture, especially when it comes to the business models, politics, and norms behind it. So, thank goodness for Ryan Broderick, who parses all of this for all of us.
In this part of one of his most recent missives, Broderick talks about Barack Obama joining Bluesky, and the history (and trajectory) of people acting like brands, and brands acting like people. He says a lot in these two paragraphs, which in his newsletter he then goes to connect to the recent incident where a reporter from The Atlantic was accidentally added to a White House Signal war-planning group.
We live in interesting times, but mainly flattened times, where nothing is expected to have any more significance than anything else, and is presented to us via little black rectangle. At this point, I feel like I want to write another thesis on misinformation and disinformation in the media landscape. But perhaps it would be too depressing.
Bluesky made a big splash at South By Southwest earlier this month, with CEO Jay Graber delivering the keynote in a sweatshirt making fun of Mark Zuckerberg. When they made the shirt available for sale, it sold out instantly — in large part because it’s the first time ever that regular people have been able to give Bluesky money. The platform started as a decentralized, not-for-profit research effort, specifically trying to avoid the mistakes of Twitter, and before the shirt, it was still funded entirely by investors. Though, as of last year, they’re working on paid subscriptions. The Bluesky team has been swearing up and down that they’re working to avoid the mistakes Twitter/X has made, but if they eventually offer a subscription to Obama that treats his account identically to yours or mine, they’ve already made the most fundamental mistake here. Because the social media landscape Obama helped create, by blending the casual and the official, is the exact same one Bluesky was founded to work against. If a brand is a person, then a person has to be a brand, especially in an algorithmically-controlled attention economy that’s increasingly shifting literally everything about social media towards getting your money. And more importantly, if a government official or group has a social media presence, it has to be both a person and a brand.
And eight years after Obama walked this tightrope all the way to the White House, Donald Trump ran it up the gut. Trump, unfortunately, understands the delirious unreality of the person/brand hybrid better than maybe anyone else on the planet. Well, he might be tied with WWE’s Vince McMahon. But Trump’s first administration established a precedent of treating his tweets as official statements. And more directly than anything I’m blaming Obama for here, Trump sent us on the rollercoaster that just loop-de-looped past “a shitty website is all the transparency the US government needs” a few weeks ago. Now, there’s no difference between a post that’s an executive order, a commercial, or someone saying whatever bullshit is on their mind. In fact, it must serve as all of the above. On one end of this, you get our current level of discourse, where random jokes are treated like they’re chiseled into stone by a divine hand.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: Mastodon (various accounts posted this, couldn’t find the original)
I’m officially middle-aged, so have given up trying to understand under-40s culture. However, it’s still worth studying, especially when it’s essentially algorithmically-determined.
In this article, Ryan Broderick gives the example of Ashton Hall, a fitness influencer:
Hall’s video, which was originally shared to his Instagram page back in February, is essentially a checklist of weird Instagram shit. A dizzying mix of products and behaviors that make no sense and that no normal person would ever actually use or try, either because Hall figured out that they’re good for engagement on his page or because he saw them in other videos because they were good for those creators’ engagement.
And so we have things that people do, and are watched doing, because an inscrutable algorithm has decided that this is what people want to watch. So this is what is served, what people consume, and therefore the content which influencers make more of. And so it goes.
Culture shifts, and not always in good ways. As the Netflix series Adolescence shows, there is a sinister underbelly to all of this. But then that is, in itself weaponised to suggest that some way to fix or solve things is to ban digital devices. Instead of, you know, digital and media literacies.
In terms of physical safety, one of the most dangerous things you can do is laugh at someone who considers themselves hyper-masculine. But this is also the correct response to all of this stuff. It’s ridiculous. So the key is to point out how ridiculous it is to boys and young men, not in a way that condemns other (unless it’s someone like Andrew Tate) but rather just how it doesn’t make any sense.
“Fifteen years ago this routine would get you called gay (or ‘metrosexual’) but is now considered peak alpha male behavior. Something weird has shifted,” influencer and commentator Matt Bernstein wrote of Hall’s video. And, yes, something has shifted. Which is that these people know that there are a lot of very sad men that are going to get served their videos, and they’re fully leaning into it.
Guys like Hall are everywhere, with vast libraries of masculinity porn meant to soothe your sad man brain. Nonsexual (usually) gender-based content, like the trad wives of TikTok, targets your desires the same way normal porn does. Unrealistic and temporarily fulfilling facsimiles of facsimiles that come in different flavors depending on what you’re into. There’s a guy who soaks his feet in coke. A guy who claims he goes to a gun range at six in the morning. A guy who brings a physical book into his home sauna. A guy who’s really into those infrared sleep masks and appears to have some kind of slave woman who has to bow to him every morning before he takes it off. A guy who does the face dunk with San Pellegrino, rather than Saratoga. An infinitely expanding universe of musclemen who want to convince you that everything in your life can be fixed if you start waking up at 4 AM to journal, buy those puffy running shoes, live in a barely furnished Miami penthouse, have no real connections in your life — especially with women — and, of course, as Hall tells his followers often on Instagram, buy their course or ebook or seminar or whatever to learn the real secrets to success.
And I’ve been surprised that this hasn’t come up more amid our current national conversation about men. Because this is the heart of it. There are a lot of very large, very dumb men who want you to sleep three hours a night and invest in vending machines and do turmeric cleanses and they all know that every man in the country is one personal crisis away from being being algorithmically inundated by their videos. And as long as that’s the case, there’s really nothing we can do to fix things.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: Screenshot of video from Ashton Hall, fitness influencer
I had a much-overdue catch-up with Will Bentinck earlier today, during which I discovered he holds a first-class degree in Philosophy! Obviously, Philosophy graduates are legimtimately The Best™ so my already high opinion of him scaled new heights.
Talking of scaling new heights, check out what happens when you plot Philosophy graduates' verbal against writing scores. All of which backs up my opinion that a Humanities degree is, in general, the best preparation for life. And, more specifically, it helps you with levels of abstraction that are going to be even more relevant and necessary in our AI-augmented future…
This data suggests (but falls a long way short of establishing) that if we want to produce graduates with general, across-the-board smarts, physics and philosophy are disciplines to encourage [and possibly also that accountancy and business administration should be discouraged (this confirms all my prejudices, I am pleased to say!)].
Source: Stephen Law
After some success ‘vibe coding’ both Album Shelf and a digital credentials issuing platform called Badge to the Future, I’ve run a couple of sessions called ‘F*ck Around and Find Out’ relating to AI. I also knocked up a career discovery tool.
I’m sharing all of these links because I think people should be experimenting with generative AI to see what it can do and where the ‘edges’ are. I said as much when recording a episode for Helen Beetham’s imperfect offerings podcast which I’m hoping will come out soon.
Discussing some of this on the All Tech is Human Slack, Noelia Amoedo shared this post from her blog. After experimenting with other tools, she like me has settled on Lovable. I used the $50/month tier last month as I ran out of prompts on the $20/month level. You do get some for free.
What I think is explicit in Noelia’s post is the potential decentralisation of power this enables. What is implicit is that it takes curiosity to do this. As I signed off Helen’s podcast as saying (spoiler alert!) “my experience has been that most people are intellectually lazy, extremely uncurious, and want to take something off the shelf, implement it without too much thought, and be considered ‘innovative’ for doing so.”
You might say that being “intellectually lazy” is using AI. But I disagree. So long as you’re not just getting it to answer an essay question or come up with a some trite, fascist-adjacent imagery, then interacting with it involves choice (which model? what prompt?) and creativity.
I settled on Lovable, a Swedish company. The fact that they were European may have influenced my decision… or did I realize that later? I did subscribe, but only for a month (I seem to have learned to moderate my impulses just a bit). I took advantage of a business trip to write the code for my website, and I worked on it between meetings over two days. It must have taken about four or five hours overall, but it could have been done in one or two hours if the content had been ready when I started. It is possibly longer than what it would have taken with WordPress, I admit, but it gave me so much flexibility! I also own the code and I can take it anywhere. I did have to figure out some “techy” things, like how to turn the JavaScript7 code into something that I could upload to my hosting service, but Lovable was right there to provide any instructions I needed, and I have to confess I enjoyed bossing him (it!!!) around to change things here or there.
Asking for something in your own words and getting it done instantly almost feels like magic, just as graphical user interfaces felt magical when we were used to command lines. And if graphical user interfaces opened the digital world to so many people who were not digital till then, conversational user interfaces are already doing the same so much faster.
[…]
I can’t help but wonder: Could this be a way to decentralize and give digital power back to the people? Could small digital companies have a better shot at long-term survival in the new ecosystem that rises, or will power end up even more concentrated? Will this bring tighter software thanks to expert computer scientists empowered by AI, or will the digital space degrade due to a bunch of “spaghetti code” that is difficult to understand and maintain? Will no-code builders like Replit or Lovable bring people closer to understanding code, or will they have the opposite effect?
I have no answers, but let me just say that my curiosity brought me closer to the code than I had ever been in 25 years, and I’d encourage you to do the same: get just a bit closer from wherever your starting point may be. Just seek to understand, and remember we understand a lot by doing. The world is changing very quickly, and the new AI wave will most likely affect you whether you want it or not. You may as well understand what’s coming, and as we would say in Spain, take the bull by the horns.
Source: Noel-IA’s Substack
Image: Snapcat by Oleksandra Mukhachova & The Bigger Picture
Thanks to Patrick Tanguay who commented on one of my LinkedIn updates, pointing me towards this post by Simon Willison.
Patrick was commenting in response to my post about ‘openness’ in relation to (generative) AI. Simon has tried out an LLM which claims to have the full stack freely available for inspection and reuse.
He tests these kinds of things by, among other things, getting it to draw a picture of a pelian riding a bicycle. The image accompanying this post is what OLMo 2 created (“refreshingly abstract”!) To be fair, Google’s Gemma 3 model didn’t do a great job either.
It’s made me think about what an appropriate test suite would be for me (i.e. subjectively) and what would be appropriate (objectively). There’s Humanity’s Last Exam but that’s based on exam-style knowledge which isn’t always super-practical.
mlx-community/OLMo-2-0325-32B-Instruct-4bit (via) OLMo 2 32B claims to be “the first fully-open model (all data, code, weights, and details are freely available) to outperform GPT3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o mini”.
Source: Simon Willison’s Weblog
I like all of what I’ve read of Adam Mastroianni’s work, but I love this. I’d enthusiastically encourage you to go and read all of it.
Mastroianni discusses a time when he went for a job interview as a professor, realising that he had a couple of choices. He could be himself, or wear a mask. Ultimately, he decided to be himself, didn’t get the job, but everything was fine.
From there, he talks about the some of the benefits and drawbacks of conformance as a species, noting that taking the mask off is incredibly liberating. I know this from experience, as it was the exact advice given to me by my therapist in 2019/20 and, guess what? Afterwards some people thought I was an asshole. But then, so did people before. At least I know where I’m at now.
[H]istorically, doing your own thing and incurring the disapproval of others has been dangerous and stupid. Bucking the trend should make you feel crazy, because it often is crazy. Humans survived the ice age, the Black Plague, two world wars, and the Tide Pod Challenge. 99% of all species that ever lived are now extinct, but we’re still standing. Clearly we’re doing something right, and so it behooves you to look around and do exactly what everybody else is doing, even when it feels wrong. That’s how we’ve made it this far, and you’re unlikely to do better by deriving all your decisions from first principles.
Maybe there are some lucky folks out there who are living Lowest Common Denominators, whose desires just magically line up with everything that is popular and socially acceptable, who would be happy living a life that could be approved by committee. But almost everyone is at least a little bit weird, and most people are very weird. If you’ve got even an ounce of strange inside you, at some point the right decision for you is not going to be the sensible one. You’re going to have to do something inadvisable, something alienating and illegible, something that makes your friends snicker and your mom complain. There will be a decision tucked behind glass that’s marked “ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?”, and you’ll have to shatter it with your elbow and reach through.
[…]
When you make that crazy choice, things get easier in exactly one way: you don’t have to lie anymore. You can stop doing an impression of a more palatable person who was born without any inconvenient desires. Whatever you fear will happen when you drop the act, some of it won’t ultimately happen, but some will. And it’ll hurt. But for me, anyway, it didn’t hurt in the stupid, meaningless way that I was used to. It hurt in a different way, like “ow!…that’s all you got?” It felt crazy until I did it, and then it felt crazy to have waited so long.
Source: Experimental History
Image: JOSHUA COLEMAN
The above Boston Dynamics video is currently doing the rounds, with yet more human-like movement. It’s pretty impressive.
The usual response to this kind of thing is amusement tinged with fear. But, as with everything, it’s the systems within which these things exist that are either problematic or unproblematic. For example, we have zero problem with these being part of a research facility; we might have reservations if they were used in military situations. But then, we use drones in combat these days?
All of which to say: there are many dangerous and scary things in the world, and there are many dangerous and scary people in the world. The way we deal with these in a sustainable and low-drama way is through policies and process. So, unless I have reason to believe otherwise, I’m going to imagine the robots in these videos doing the jobs that currently require humans doing things that might endanger their health, such as rescuing people from burning buildings, inspecting nuclear reactors, and even doing very repetitive tasks under time pressure in warehouses.
Yes, AI and robots are going to replace jobs. No, it’s not the end of the world.
[L]est we forget who’s been at the forefront of humanoid research for more than a decade, Boston Dynamics has just released new footage of its stunning Atlas robot taking natural-looking motion to yet another level.
[…]
As humans learn to walk, run and move in the world, we start anticipating little elements of balance, planning ahead on the fly in a dynamic and changing situation. That’s what we’re watching the AIs learn to master here.
The current explosion in humanoid robotics is still at a very early stage. But watching Atlas and its contemporaries do with the physical world what GPT and other language models are doing with the world of information – this is sci-fi come to life. […]
These things will be confined to factories for the most part as they begin entering the workforce en masse, but it’s looking clearer than ever that humans and androids will be interacting regularly in daily life sooner than most of us ever imagined.
Source: New Atlas
Yes, yes, more AI commentary but this is a really good post that you should read in its entirety. I’m zeroing on one part of it because I like the analogy of Silicon Valley looking less like capitalism and more like the nonprofit space.
TL;DR: just as we haven’t got fully self-driving cars yet, or any of the other techno-utopian/dystopian technology that was promised years ago, so we’re not about to all be immediately replaced by AI.
Yes, it’s going to have an impact. And, of course, lazy uncurious people are going to use it in lazy uncurious ways. But, the way I see it, we should be more interested in the structures behind the AI bubble. Because although there is useful tech in there, it remains a bubble.
In many ways, Silicon Valley looks less like capitalism and more like a nonprofit. The way you get rich isn’t to sell products to consumers, because you’re likely giving away your product for free, and your customers wouldn’t pay for it if you tried to charge them. If you’re a startup, and not FAANG, the way you pay your bills is to convince someone who’s already rich to give you money. Maybe that’s a venture capital investment, but if you want to get really rich yourself, it’s selling your business to one of the big guys.
You’re not selling a product to a consumer, but selling a story to someone who believes in it, and values it enough to put money towards it. That story of how you can change the world could be true, of course. Plenty of nonprofits have a real and worthwhile impact. But it’s not the same as getting a customer to buy a product at retail. Instead, you’re selling a vision and then a story of how you’ll achieve it. This is the case if you go to a VC, it’s the case if you get a larger firm to buy you, and it’s the case if you’re talking ordinary investors into buying your stock. (Tesla’s stock price is plummeting because Musk’s brand has made Tesla’s brand toxic. But Tesla’s corporate board can’t get rid of him, because investors bought Tesla’s stock—and pumped it to clearly overvalued levels—precisely because they believe in the myth of Musk as a world-historical innovator who will, any day now, unleash the innovations that’ll bring unlimited profits.) (Silicon Valley has, however, given us seemingly unlimited prophets.)
What this means for AI is that, even if the tech bros recognized how far their models are from writing great fiction or solving the trolley problem, they couldn’t admit as much, because it would deflate the narrative they need to sell.
Source: Aaron Ross Powell
Image: Maxim Hopman
You won’t see me linking to the Torygraph often, but in this case I want to show that it’s not just left-leaning very online people who are concerned about the UK’s Online Safety Act (2023) which came into force this week.
Neil Brown, a lawyer whose specialities include intenet, telecoms, and tech law, has set up a site collating information provided by Ofcom, the communications regulator. As far as I understand it, Ofcom couldn’t have done a worse job in conjuring up fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There are online forums and other spaces shutting down just in case, as the fines are huge.
This is an interesting time for WAO to be starting work with Amnesty International UK on a community platform for activists. Yet more unhelpful ambiguity to traverse. Yay.
Dozens of small internet forums have blocked British users or shut down as new online safety laws come into effect, with one comparing the new regime to a British version of China’s “great firewall”.
Several smaller community-led sites have stopped operating or restricted services, blaming new illegal harms duties enforced by Ofcom from Monday.
[…]
Britain’s Online Safety Act, a sprawling set of new internet laws, include measures to prevent children from seeing abusive content, age verification for adult websites, criminalising cyber-flashing and deepfakes, and cracking down on harmful misinformation.
Under the illegal harms duties that came into force on Monday, sites must complete risk assessments detailing how they deal with illegal material and implement safety measures to deal with the risk.
The Act allows Ofcom to fine websites £18m or 10pc of their turnover.
The regulator has pledged to prioritise larger sites, which are more at risk of spreading harmful content to a large number of users.
“We’re not setting out to penalise small, low-risk services trying to comply in good faith, and will only take action where it is proportionate and appropriate,” a spokesman said.
Source: The Telegraph
Image: Icons8 Team
There are some people who I follow who have done such interesting stuff in their lives, and whose new work continues to help me think in new ways. Buster Benson is one of these, and his latest post (unfortunately on Substack) is the beginnings of a choose-your-own-adventure style quiz about cosmology, a.k.a. “the nature of reality.”
So… I’ve been thinking a lot about cosmologies, and how in these times of chaos there seems to be a proliferation of new ways of thinking about the nature of reality springing up. If you have a few moments, can you take this short quiz and let me know which result you got, and how you feel about it?
Below you’ll find a some questions designed to help you identify and share your fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality (aka your cosmology). It’s not meant to be a comprehensive survey of all possible cosmologies, but rather a tool to help you identify your own cosmology and perhaps to spark a fun conversation with others. It’s also not meant to critique or judge any of the cosmologies for being more or less true, more or less useful, or more or less good — but rather meant to be window of observation into what beliefs exist out there amongst you all right now.
FWIW, I came out as the following, which (as I commented on Buster’s post) is entirely unsurprising to me:
Pragmatic Instrumentalism — You see scientific theories as powerful tools for prediction and control rather than literal descriptions of an ultimate reality. The value of materialism lies in its extraordinary practical utility and predictive success, not in metaphysical claims about what “really” exists. This pragmatic approach sidesteps unresolvable metaphysical debates while maintaining the full practical power of scientific methodology.
Source: Buster’s Rickshaw
Image: Good Free Photos
There’s a guy I no longer interact with because I found him too angry. But when I used to follow him, he used to talk about how Big Tech’s plan was to ‘farm’ us. It’s a very Matrix-esque metaphor, but given recent developments and collaborations between Big Tech and the government in the US, perhaps not incorrect?
Businesses like predictability. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, per se — but, at scale, that can become a bit weird. Think, for example, how odd it is to be reduced to a single button shaped like a ‘heart’ on some social networks to be able to ‘react’ to what someone else has posted. There was a time when people would actually comment more, but the like button has reduced that.
Now, of course, some social networks allow you to ‘react’ in different ways: ‘applause’, perhaps, or maybe you might want to mark that something is ‘insightful’. We might consider doing so as being “better than nothing,” but is it? How does it rearrange our interactions with one another, allowing a particular technology platform (with its own set of affordances and norms, etc.) to intermediate our interactions?
Fast-forward to this month and, of course, Meta is experimenting with a feature that allows people to use AI to reply to posts. This is already a thing on LinkedIn. It’s going about as well as you’d expect.
AI is all over social media. We have AI influencers, AI content, and AI accounts — and, now, it looks like we might get AI comments on Instagram posts, too. What are any of us doing this for anymore?
App researcher Jonah Manzano shared a post on Threads and a video on TikTok showing how some Instagram users now notice a pencil with a star icon in their comments field, allowing them to post AI-generated comments under posts and videos.
[…]
In the video on TikTok that Manzano shared, three comment options are: “Cute living room setup!” “love the casual vibe here,” and “gray cap is so cool.” Unfortunately, all three of these are clearly computer-generated slop and take an already shaky human interaction down a notch.
It’s hard to know why you’d want to remove the human element from every aspect of social media, but Instagram seems to be going to try it anyway.
Source: Mashable
Image: Mimi Di Cianni
Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations is always worth reading, but the most recent issue in particular is a goldmine. I could post every image from it, including the Bayeux Tapestry one. But my mother reads this, and although I’m middle-aged, I still don’t want to disappoint her by including unnecessary profanity here 😅
What interests me about the above image is that this kind of re-contextualisation has been going on for so long, and massively pre-dates the internet. As someone who was a mid-teenager when first getting onto the internet, I’m too young to remember anything like this.
I need to think more about this, but, inspired by Episode #62 of the In Bed With The Right podcast, there’s a way in which you can see AI-generated imagery shared on social media by ‘conservatives’ as the fascist-adjacent version of this. Except, instead of being clever commentary, it’s lazy nostalgia-baiting.
1966: University of Strasbourg Student Union funds are lifted by Situationist sympathisers to print Andre Bertrand’s short comic RETURN OF THE DURUTTI COLUMN, which used stills from Hollywood movies in a process then termed detournement: familiar materials recontextualised in opposition (or at strange angles) to their original intent. This is something so common on the internet now that most people may not know there’s a word for it. The only useful Google hit I can find for Andre Bertrand today is, funnily enough, the Wikipedia page for an attorney who specialises in copyright law.
Source and image: Orbital Operations
You may or may not be aware that I use a service called Micro.blog to run Thought Shrapnel these days. It’s the work of a small team, who do a great job. But I bump up against the edges of it quite a lot, especially when it comes to the newsletter/digest.
So I’ve thought for a while about switching to Ghost. Not only is it Open Source, but for the last year they’ve been figuring out ActivityPub integration. That’s the protocol that underpins Fediverse apps such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bonfire. Long story short, there’s a lot to think about in terms of user experience and performance, so getting it right takes a while.
They’ve just announced that those using their Ghost(Pro) hosting can try out the ActivityPub integration for the first time. I’m very tempted to switch, but the cost ($40/month for the number of subscribers we have around these parts) is putting me off. Perhaps if I encouraged more people to become supporters…?
Today we’re opening a public beta for our social web integration in Ghost. For the first time, any site on Ghost(Pro) can now try out ActivityPub.
[T]hanks for your patience! It hasn’t been easy to get this far, but we’re excited to hear what you think as you become one of our very first explorers to launch into the Fediverse.
Source: Ghost Newsletter
Image: Markus Spiske
I’m sharing this not for the functionality of site, although I’m sure it provides a useful service. Instead, I’m sharing it to demonstrate a point: on the web, you can consume content however you choose. Don’t just put up with how it’s presented to you by default! I could go on about how this a key part of developing digital literacies, but I won’t 😉
In the above gif, I’m using the built in ‘Boosts’ feature of the Arc web browser to change the extremely poor choice of a tiny 8-bit font for something… more readable. This built-in functionality is something you can achieve on other web browsers using tools such as Tampermonkey and Stylish.
Source: Job.Hunt.Works
Kenya, much like the UK, has a housing crisis. Mtamu Kililo has an unusual plan to address it: mushrooms. Having just finished Overstory, I am extremely receptive to the kind of nature-first solution that Kililo is proposing goes more mainstream.
One thing I’ve learned during my career to date is that most people are aspirational, meaning that proving that something works for rich or forward-thinking people makes it more palatable to others. For example, if the mushroom bricks discussed here feature on Grand Designs then they’re likely to get some traction.
I wish the world were different and that we could learn from societies that have lived in harmony with nature for millennia. But here we are. I hope that MycoTile is successful and creates a whole new sector of sustainable building materials using waste products. Fingers crossed!
I’m the co-founder and chief executive of MycoTile, which works to produce affordable building materials out of agricultural waste bonded with oyster-mushroom mycelium, a network of tiny filaments that forms a root-like structure for the mushroom.
[…]
MycoTile’s insulation panels have been installed in a few projects, including in student accommodation, and we have seen that the material works. It greatly reduced the sound travelling from one room to the next, and helped to regulate the temperature inside. This insulation is affordable, costing about two-thirds of the price of conventional insulation. And unlike those materials, it can be composted at the end of the building’s life.
[…] The insulation tiles are a success; now we’re working on developing a sturdy block like a brick. When we can produce a brick to build external walls and partitions, it will be a huge step towards affordable housing.
Source: Nature (archive version)
Image: Rachel Horton-Kitchlew
I’m composing this on the train on my way back home from a CoTech gathering in London. Post-pandemic, I spend 99% of my working life at home, especially now that there so few in-person events. So I was really glad to spend time among like-minded people and talk about ways we can work together a bit more.
The people I spent time with today are part of a work community. Some of them I count as friends, but none live very close to me. I am, therefore, quite detached from my geographic community, with my only really connection to the place where I live coming through shopping, my kids' sporting activities, and my (temporarily paused) gym membership.
This post by Mike Monteiro responds to a reader question about whether they can be happy even if they hate their job. Monteiro, who identifies as Gen X, harks back to his youth, talking about how school and work was compartmentalised so that people could be themselves outside of those strictures.
The problem now is that, for reasons Monteiro goes into, work invades our homes and community life, hollowing and emptying it out until it’s devoid of meaning. As a result, we have, perhaps unrealistic expectations of what work can provide for us. Except, of course, if you own your own business and work with your friends. I just wish they were nearer by and I got to hang out with them more.
Perhaps I need more offline hobbies.
When we think of our community, we’re likely to picture the people at work. Because it’s where we’re spending the majority of our time. This is by design, but it isn’t our design. It’s the company’s design. In that earlier era, when we still drank from garden hoses, losing a job sucked, but it mostly didn’t take your community with it. In this new era, losing a job means getting gutted. Not only do you lose your paycheck, but you lose access to all the people and places where you used to have your non-work-but-actually-at-work fun. And while your old co-workers will promise that you can still hang out outside work (they mean it, by the way), they’ll soon realize that they don’t really do much “outside work.”
The pandemic put a little bit of a dent in this plan, of course, because you were now working from home, but they adjusted quickly to this by keeping you on wall-to-wall Zoom calls for 12 hours a day. Which wasn’t completely sustainable (even though they said it would be) because when your zoom calls are happening on a laptop facing the window, you eventually start peeking out at what’s beyond that window, and you get curious…
Work is part of our lives, a big part to be sure, but what if it wasn’t our whole life?
They want you to return to work, to their simulation of happiness and community, because they’re afraid that if you don’t you might remember that there was a time when you were free. And you were happy. And you drank from garden hoses.
Source: Mike Monteiro
Image: NOAA
Some pretty stark charts showing the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world, in this case using data about the USA. What I like about the way they’ve done this is that, for many of them, ‘trend lines’ are included which allow you to see whether things have gone back to ‘normal’ or stayed… weird.
Over here, unlike other developed nations, the UK has experienced a sharp rise in the post-pandemic number of health-related benefit claims. The number of 16 to 64 year-olds on disability benefits in England and Wales now stands at 2.9m, an increase of almost a million. Around half of those are mental-health related claims. It is ridiculous, therefore that the Labour government is planning to cut disability benefits while “help[ing] those who can work into work.” Forcing, more like.
My wife and I “celebrated” our 40th birthdays during lockdown, so the pandemic has pretty much cleaved our lives into two: there was what came before and now what has come after. At the moment, I massively preferred what came before. How about you?
Decades from now, the pandemic will be visible in the historical data of nearly anything measurable today: an unmistakable spike, dip or jolt that officially began for Americans five years ago this week.
Here’s an incomplete collection of charts that capture that break — across the economy, health care, education, work, family life and more.
Source & image: The New York Times
I’ve been following Paul Stamatiou, aka ‘Stammy’, since he was at Georgia Tech. He’s worked at Twitter, co-founded a couple of startups, and now seems to be pivoting into AI search.
What I like about Stammy’s deep dive blog posts is that he blends an understanding of technology through the lens of design with a level of pragmatism you don’t usually see. In this post, he talks about the serendipity of the web we’re increasingly losing in favour of AI answers. But, at the same time, he talks about the convenience and value of those answers, wondering if there’s another way of using these tools to serve human curiosity.
To my mind, there’s a design angle here on the ‘supply’ side, but there’s also an opportunity to cultivate AI literacies in order to use these kind of tools effectively.
Browsing with traditional search engines wasn’t exactly seamless but you were in the driver’s seat. You would occasionally end up on some obscure personal site or forum that was unexpectedly right up your alley.
Those magical detours defined our web experience, enriching us with insight and creativity while establishing human connections. Today’s instant answers with these AI tools sacrifice this beautiful chaos that once made the internet so captivating. But there’s hope—a new kind of browsing experience might just be around the corner.
[…]
Serendipity while browsing the web wasn’t just a byproduct of how the web began to form. It stretched our empathy by exposing us to diverse voices, nudged us out of echo chambers, and kept our web from becoming monotonous.
That style of surfing the web is fading away. What social media hasn’t already taken over, or search engines haven’t already diluted by sending us to ad-laden mainstream sites, is now steadily being eroded by AI-powered answer engines.
[…]
Today’s AI answer engines face fundamental challenges that go beyond the feeling of nostalgia for the old web, surfacing some bespoke notion about serendipitous discovery, or wanting more indie content bubbled up. The real issues—weak attribution, black-box decision-making, and homogenized responses—threaten to flatten rather than enrich how we use the web. Browsing the web isn’t and shouldn’t be a one size fits all experience.
The current generation of AI tools faces a prodigious challenge: how can they surprise and delight you when they know almost nothing about you?
[…]
AI personalization doesn’t have to be about consuming every detail of your life or cloning yourself. We’ve fended off giving too much personal data to individual companies, why start now? You don’t need to be digitally cloned to help you throughout your day. Even a little bit of info about your past interactions, goals, and interests can go a long way to delivering experiences that resonate more deeply with you.
[…]
Even with light personalization, AI answer engines could meaningfully tailor their responses to you. They would know you’re very technical and experienced with the topic at hand to skip the basics and dive deeper into technical concepts. They would know you’ve been writing about technology for 20 years and really enjoy the underlying ways things work and always want that deeper understanding. And so many other things that might seem like minute details at first, but combined really add up.
[…]
The magic of browsing the web isn’t quite gone, but it’s waiting to be reinvented.
Source & image: Paul Stamatiou
As people who read my weeknotes will be aware, I’ve got some kind of undiagnosed heart condition going on at the moment. This has meant that I’ve gone from running three times per week (20-25km) and hitting the gym three times a week, to not being able to walk very far without my heart rate spiking.
This week, I’ve had Angina and arrhythmia ruled out, but I’ve got to have further tests such as an echocardiogram and MRI. The consultant said that he was going to be “open and honest” with me that “it might take a long time” to figure out what’s wrong with me, and that I’m going to have to make some “lifestyle changes.”
NHS staff are under pressure and, for the most part, do a great job. They don’t have a long time to spend with patients, which is why I’ve started using AI tools such as Perplexity to investigate my symptoms. It’s important to know that this is alongside the tests I’m having done; unless I go private (not going to happen) I’ve got a bit of wait time before my next tests.
I know that some people reading this will be shocked that I would discuss my health details with an LLM. But, I would say, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. I run one of the world’s most secure operating systems on my mobile device, but I’m telling some AI about my medical issues? Yep. I contain multitudes.
In the post I’ve excerpted below, Brett McKay from The Art of Manliness gives 30 ways in which AI can help make your life easier. I’ve used about half of them. But, even if you use private mode, a temporary window, a local LLM or some other way of obfuscating your identity, I’d give it a try.
There are some legit concerns to have about AI, to be sure. It’s not always accurate and not yet great at everything. But if used in the right way and with the right stance, AI can be really handy, improving your life and making it better and easier. It’s like having a personal assistant without paying personal assistant prices.
[…]
Figure out a health issue. I’ve replaced Dr. Google with Dr. ChatGPT. I’ll just type in my symptoms (and sometimes upload a picture — don’t forget that AI can analyze images!) and ask ChatGPT about the potential causes. For example, I’ve been having some pain in my quads lately. I couldn’t determine if it was a muscle strain or a tendon issue. So I told ChatGPT where my pain was, what the pain felt like, when I experienced it, and what precipitated the pain. ChatGPT helped me figure out that I’m dealing with a muscle strain and not a tendon issue. My daughter had some bumps show up on her foot the other week, and I couldn’t tell what it was. So I snapped a pic, uploaded it to ChatGPT, and asked, “What is this?” ChatGPT ruled it a bug bite. Should you rely on ChatGPT to diagnose you for big issues? No, but it can help you troubleshoot minor problems and know when to consult a healthcare provider (when in doubt, go see a doc!).
Explain medical test results. I’ve used ChatGPT to help explain medical test results I’ve gotten in terms I can understand. My father-in-law recently got an EKG and the cardiologist only spent a few minutes giving him a cursory explanation of the results. My FIL then went home and ran the results through AI, which gave him a lot more details.
Source: The Art of Manliness
Ben Buchanan, until recently the Biden administration’s AI special adviser, joins Ezra Klein to discuss lots of things about AI in the past, present, and future. It’s particularly interesting because, as Klein points out, Buchanan “is not a guy working for an A.I. lab. So he’s not being paid by the big A.I. labs to tell you this technology is coming.”
There’s a lot of US-specific conversation, but I’m most interested in the impact on labour markets, which I think we’re already seeing even with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the rise of the surveillance state.
One of the things which is most markedly different between my childhood and that of my two teenagers is the amount of surveillance and tracking of everyday life which is seen as ‘normal’. Even small, relatively prosaic things, such as messaging app showing by default that a message has been ‘read’. Or location tracking, whether it’s via Snap Maps, ANPR cameras on roads, or CCTV in city centres.
As mentioned in a previous post, you need to be very careful about norms, policies, and laws you encode into AI enforcement / policing / standardisation.
I would decompose this question about A.I. and autocracy or the surveillance state into two parts.
The first is the China piece of this. How does this play out in a state that is truly, in its bones, an autocracy and doesn’t even make any pretense toward democracy?
I think we could agree pretty quickly here that this makes very tangible something that is probably core to the aspiration of their society — of a level of control that only an A.I. system could help bring about. I just find that terrifying.
As an aside, there’s a saying in both Russian and Chinese: “Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away.”
Historically, even in those autocracies, there was some kind of space where the state couldn’t intrude because of the scale and the breadth of the nation. And in those autocracies, A.I. could make the force of government power worse.
Then there’s the more interesting question in the United States: What is the relationship between A.I. and democracy?
I share some of the discomfort here. There have been thinkers, historically, who have said that part of the ways we revise our laws is when people break the laws. There’s a space for that, and I think there is a humanness to our justice system that I wouldn’t want to lose.
We tasked the Department of Justice to run a process and think about this and come up with principles for the use of A.I. in criminal justice. In some cases, there are advantages to it — like cases are treated alike with the machine.
But also there’s tremendous risk of bias and discrimination and so forth because the systems are flawed and, in some cases, because the systems are ubiquitous. And I do think there is a risk of a fundamental encroachment on rights from the widespread unchecked use of A.I. in the law enforcement system that we should be very alert to and that I, as a citizen, have grave concerns about.
Source: The Ezra Klein Show (archived version)
Image: Emily Rand & LOTI
I’m kind of sick about posting about AI so much, but I did want to point out something with another new thing. This video is for Manus “a general AI agent that bridges minds and actions: it doesn’t just think, it delivers results.” Apparently, you can just leave it to do things for you. Except, erm, you can’t.
Here’s the promo video:
Notice that the three examples are essentially about ranking, whether that’s people, property, or stocks. Also, are all of the fake job applicants it shows male? As TechCrunch found, doing something else which probably should be pretty straightforward, causes some showstopping problems.
“Glimpses of AGI,” indeed 🙄
I asked the platform to handle what seemed to me like a pretty straightforward request: order a fried chicken sandwich from a top-rated fast food joint in my delivery range. After about 10 minutes, Manus crashed. On the second attempt, it found a menu item that met my criteria, but Manus couldn’t complete the ordering process — or provide a checkout link, even.
Manus similarly whiffed when I asked it to book a flight from NYC to Japan. Given instructions that I thought didn’t leave much room for ambiguity (e.g. “look for a business-class flight, prioritizing price and flexible dates”), the best Manus could do was serve up links to fares across several airline websites and airfare search engines like Kayak, some of which were broken.
Hoping the next few tasks might be the charm, I told Manus to reserve a table for one at a restaurant within walking distance. It failed after a few minutes. Then I asked the platform to build a Naruto-inspired fighting game. It errored out half an hour in, which is when I decided to throw in the towel.
Source and image: TechCrunch
WAO wrote a report on Harnessing AI for environmental justice which serves as the background to this post by Christian Graham from Friends of the Earth. He points out that LLMs can be problematic in terms of human progress in at least a couple of important ways.
First, referencing existing norms and frameworks could make it more difficult for new, exciting, and innovative ideas to break through. Second, AI enforcement / policing / standardisation could make it difficult for us to correct course away from a problematic trajectory.
It’s well worth a read. Even though I’ve found LLMs to be extremely useful as a ‘thought partner’ for coming with new angles on existing problems, I’m not sure the majority of people would use them in such a nuanced way. After all, the US Secretary of State is already threatening to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear “pro-Hamas”.
(On a more prosaic level, can we expect much nuance when, last month, ‘Google’ was the sixth most-searched term… on Google? People, including politicians and policymakers, value convenience even/over everything else)
No one built this to be unjust. It’s just an AI doing its job: optimising for carbon cuts, personal accountability and cold, hard data. Yet baked into it are early 21st-century blind spots: climate as your burden, not the system’s. And AI as some impartial oracle.
This is technological lock-in. Not a grand conspiracy, but a thousand quiet choices, hardening into a future we can’t easily unwrite.
[…]
[S]tability isn’t always a good thing. The same features that make AI useful could also make it inflexible, resistant to new ideas and blind to the possibility of better alternatives:
- Old biases risk becoming permanent – AI trained on today’s moral and economic frameworks might prioritise corporate-led sustainability initiatives over grassroots action or overvalue GDP growth as the main measure of success.
- Future breakthroughs could struggle to take hold – Just as a Victorian-trained AI might have discouraged Darwin from publishing, future scientists, activists, and policymakers could find themselves fighting against AI-driven inertia.
- AI governance might become self-referential – If AI models continually cite their own outputs as authoritative sources, they could create self-reinforcing knowledge loops, making early 21st-century assumptions feel like eternal truths.
- Technology stops being a tool for change – If AI systems shape environmental, legal, and economic policies based on past precedent, it becomes harder for movements that challenge the status quo to gain traction. Instead of being a force for progress, AI becomes a force for keeping things exactly as they are.
We can already see early signs of this happening. AI is being used in policing in ways that prioritise past data over future possibilities. The more we embed today’s norms into these systems, the harder it will be to course-correct later.
Source: Friends of the Earth
Image: Jamillah Knowles & We and AI
Bryan Mathers is a friend, WAO collaborator, and creator of the Thought Shrapnel logo. He has an occasional newsletter which is always a ray of sunshine in my inbox. His latest, in particular, was delightful.
If I check in with myself at all in the mornings, it’ll be to figure out what I call my ‘emotional temperature’. This approach is much more granular, nuanced and considered. I like it!
Even though there’s a chance that over time I’ll extend these reflecto-glyphs so that it takes me two hours to get started in the morning, I quite like the little rhythm that I’ve found. Saying hello to the morning, and adopting the curious position of “well what have we here?” to the day ahead. Otherwise, I’m a sucker for the first distraction or burning issue that the day presents, and a hostage to the irrational anxieties that lie at the back of my head…
Source: The Visual Thinker
I’m increasingly of the opinion that being on any centralised platform is waste of time, at least in the long run. I’m not even sure what I’m doing on LinkedIn these days, as it’s certainly not useful for finding an actual job.
The Fediverse is the future; at least the future I want to inhabit.
The fediverse is a jailbreak. It’s not a product, not a single platform, it’s not something you can buy stock in or use to enrich yourself at the cost of our shared humanity. It’s a network of independent, interconnected social platforms, all running on open protocols like ActivityPub. It’s an ecosystem where you - not some incellionaire obsessed with eugenics - own your digital identity. Where your social graph belongs to you, not an algorithm’s shifting fucking whims. Where moving from one service to another doesn’t mean losing everything you’ve built and everything you’ve ever said.
We’ve been trained to believe that the way things are is the way they have to be. That Meta, Google, and whatever the hell Twitter is calling itself today are the price of admission to digital society. That you can’t have discovery without algorithmic engineering. That the internet was supposed to become a shopping mall where every interaction is measured in ad revenue. But none of this was inevitable. It was built this way—on purpose. And the fediverse offers something else: freedom.
[…]
The fediverse won’t succeed just because it’s better. It will succeed if and only if people choose it. If they reject the idea that being trapped in someone else’s ecosystem is just the cost of existing online. If they stop believing that “free” means surrendering ownership of your own connections, your own history, your own data. If they see that the internet wasn’t built to be a factory for engagement metrics and AI-generated content farms. It was built to connect us, not silo us to pad a wealth-extremist’s bank account.
[…]
The fediverse isn’t a distant dream—it’s here, right now, waiting for you to step outside the walls and see what’s possible.
Source: Joan Westenberg
Image: Ayrus Hill
Interesting stuff from Mihnea Măruță, who explains the origin of the philosophy of accelerationism, which goes back to at least the Italian futurists. They provided the underpinnings for Mussolini’s fascism, and the updated version of this idea (“neo-reactionism”) underpins what’s happening in the US at the moment.
This movement, which considers democracy to have become an obstacle to capitalism, is called the neo-reactionary movement, abbreviated NRx.
It is also referred to as the “Dark Enlightenment.” That term belongs to the English philosopher Nick Land, and it’s also the title of one of his books.
And so we reach the philosophical heart of the matter, because, in fact, the most fitting explanation for everything that astonishes us in America today is a philosophical one, from which political, economic, and social consequences follow.
[…]
Accelerating society toward the future, at full throttle—this would be the path envisioned by the neo-reactionary movement.
[…]
[T]he accelerationist vision is to speed things up, to unleash a hyper-capitalism, a total techno-capitalism, an anarcho-capitalism—call it what you like—a system of private governance of a monarchical type, in which the president is the general manager, the CEO of a community-company, and citizens become shareholders of that state, transformed and run according to capitalist principles of efficiency and profit.
In the accelerationist view, nation-states are obsolete and need to be replaced by a global network of city-states and autonomous territories, if possible built from scratch.
[…]
For more details, you can look at a few existing projects: Culdesac in Arizona, Prospera in Honduras, Cabin in Texas, Neighborhood SF, NOMAD, or Praxis.
[…]
The world is changing before our eyes, and it’s essential that we understand in which direction. We’re not just dealing with whims or improvisations.
Source: Mihnea Măruță
Image: Logan Voss
The thing that capitalists control is, unsurprisingly, capital. This controls how western societies work: if workers, minorities, or any other oppressed group gain too much power, capitalists use economic levers and controls to put people back in their place.
In this post, Audrey Watters reflects on the pandemic realisation about the need for student-centric education reform, and what has happened since. Which is the opposite of that.
I recently saw someone say (citation needed) that we might view this as the ongoing fallout from the pandemic, when, for a brief period, some workers were able to win some concessions from their employers: the ability to work from home, most notably. There has been an uptick in unionization and in public support for unions in the US too, reversing the past few decades' trends for both. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the response from management has been to fire people, to threaten to fire people, and to threaten to replace people with robots (or in today’s parlance, with chatbots or AI agents).
[…]
Arguably, much of the push for even more technology, even more automation, even more control, even more surveillance in the classroom is a consequence of the pandemic too. Recall the astonished recognition – it was ever-so-brief – that teaching was the most important and most difficult job and that teachers needed to not just be praised but compensated much much much better. And now, that’s been erased — purposefully; and conservatives and technologists and politicians alike feel it necessary to put teachers (read: women) back “in their place.”
[…]
During the pandemic, schools had the opportunity to radically rethink what education might look like – as a workplace for teachers, to be sure, but also as a place of growth and exploration and learning for students. Instead many opted to double-down on the worst aspects of school, to embrace some of the worst sorts of surveillance technologies – test-proctoring software, most egregiously.
There was — again, briefly — widespread revulsion about education technology during the pandemic. So dull, so dehumanizing. And now? Now we’re handing everything over to AI – a complete and total surrender to “the digital” at the expense of “the human,” letting the demands of the technology industry dictate pedagogy and research and assessment rather than respond to the needs of teachers or students or parents or communities.
Source: Second Breakfast
Image: Waldemar
One of the things I’m a bit concerned about when it comes to generative AI is the replacement of historically accurate images and text with AI slop. There’s a difference between what we’d like to be true, or what is plausible, and what actually happened.
Mike Caulfield shares a good example of this with the Abernathy brothers, who made several cross-country trips across the USA unaccompanied by adults. The AI version of this is nothing like the badass version above.
In 1910, at ages 10 and 6, they rode horseback from Oklahoma to New York City to meet ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, and became nationwide celebrities. They followed this up with a transcontinental horseride in 1911, setting a speed record. In 1913, pooling some money from earlier stunts, they bought an Indian 1000cc motorcycle, and drove it from Oklahoma to New York City — then retired from public life at the wise old ages of 13 and 10.
[…]
This is honestly the coolest picture I’ve seen in a month. Every bit of it is rich with meaning and resonance.
What are we doing here? Why are we sucking history through a straw?
I am at a loss for words.
Source: The End(s) of Argument
Frustrated by a lack of work coming in, and seeing people with 1/100th of my knowledge, experience, and skill being lauded on LinkedIn and elsewhere, I complained to my wife. She said a bunch of things in return, but one of them was something along the lines of, “the thing you don’t realise is that people just want to be entertained.”
This ‘State of the Culture’ speech is very US-centric, but nevertheless captures something about the specific moment we’re facing. Not just a Thomas Friedman-style ‘flat’ world, but a flattened world. As Cory Doctorow says, it’s five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four. When’s the resistance to all this going to come? Or are we too busy being amused ourselves to death?
Twenty years ago, the culture was flat. Today it’s flattened.
“Corporations didn’t intend to make the culture stagnant and boring. All they really want is to impose standardization and predictability—because it’s more profitable.”
I still participate in many web platforms—I need to do it for my vocation. (But do I really? I’ve started to wonder.) But now they feel constraining.
Even worse, they now all feel the same.
Instead of connecting with people all over the world, I now get “streaming content” 24/7.
Facebook no longer wants me stay in touch with friends overseas, or former classmates, or distant relatives. Instead it serves up memes and stupid short videos.
And they are the exact same memes and videos playing non-stop on TikTok—and Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube shorts, etc.
Every big web platforms feels the exact same.
That whole rich tapestry of my friends and family and colleagues has been replaced by the most shallow and flattened digital fluff. And this feeling of flattening is intensified by the lack of context or community.
The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness.
Source: The Honest Broker
Image: Ted Gioia / The Honest Broker
Dorian Taylor is a certified Smart Person making things that I don’t even understand. What I want to focus on here, however, is his overview of Dr Kate Starbird’s recent talk.
Starbird gives an overview of the self-reinforcing right-wing disinformation ecosystem where participants are rewarded — implicitly or explicitly — for creating an alternate reality. It’s no surprise, therefore, that those who are taking charge in around the world are those that can use and amplify this disinformation.
It’s worth pointing out, as [this Bluesky post] (https://bsky.app/profile/suchmayer.bsky.social/post/3ljrwhvvitk2j) does, that it’s not as if the intention to create alternate realities hasn’t always been there. It’s just that with the consumer technologies available these days, there’s more scope for “free-for-all improv theatre.” It’s all entertainment; it’s a game with extremely serious consequences.
[The] right-wing (dis)information ecosystem is highly participatory, per Dr. Starbird: “improvised collaborations between witting agents and unwitting though willing crowds of sincere believers”. It’s a free-for-all improv theatre with all sorts of incentives for various actors to participate, from individual curiosity-seekers, to media personalities, to hostile state actors. It rewards participation and affords a conduit for any participant to get up on stage and perform for the audience, influence elite talking points, shape policy, and win fabulous cash prizes. The right-wing disinformation ratchet operates as follows:
- Political elites set the frame (“immigrants are criminals”),
- random participants make spurious claims (“they’re eating your pets”),
- the claims get boosted on social media by various influencers,
- they get aggregated and concentrated on—and further boosted by—fringe websites and blogs,
- Joe Rogan (or whoever) repeats the most salient claim on his podcast,
- the claim eventually makes it on Fox News,
- and is then rebroadcast from the bully pulpit,
- which energizes the mob and motivates them to continue.
The rest of the media ecosystem, by contrast, still adheres to a top-down model of broadcasting polished and vetted messages, researched and workshopped by professionals of rapidly dwindling efficacy.
[…]
On its face, fighting back against the right-wing bullshit apparatus amounts to a massive collective action problem—the very kind, with some adjustments, that said apparatus is great at mobilizing. So step one is to copy them. They have an advantage, though, which I find troubling: they don’t have to worry about reality.
[…]
How do you fight an information war when you’re on the side of reality? When reality usually doesn’t matter? The key, I am beginning to suspect, is except when it does. Reality, if you don’t sufficiently attend to it, has a tendency to kick your ass. This can be wielded as a weapon.
Source: The Making of Making Sense
Image: Elimende Inagella
This is a difficult article to excerpt, mainly because it follows the story of one woman and, in doing so, opens up a vast network of professionally-run scam businesses. It’s well worth a read to understand what’s going on in the world, and how much of a whole economy exists swindling people out of money.
Much of this is based on social engineering, as banks and other financial institutions have put in place technical counter-measures. But the landscape is always shifting, and it’s lucrative business when it’s possible to ‘earn’ $20,000/month for working in a well-lit, efficiently-run office.
For crime groups looking to turn a profit, operating a call center can be more lucrative than trafficking drugs, since the margins are higher and the risks of being caught much lower, according to an investigator from Spain’s Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalonian police, who specializes in investment fraud networks.
[…]
Divided up into different language “desks,” the call center agents use fake names that match the country they are tasked with calling — in the Georgian call center, agents calling Spain had names like “Esteban Fernandez,” while the Russian desk was led by “Kseniya Koen” and the English desk employed “Mary Roberts.”
[…]
“The profits they make without risking anything are enormous,” said the investigator, who was not authorized to speak on the record about his work.
[…]
“Pure phishing frauds, where you can steal a person’s credentials … have been reduced by technical measures,” said Sakari Tuominen, Detective Superintendent of the country’s National Cyber-enabled Crimes Unit. “But then there’s this crime of fraud through social engineering, where a person first builds a trusting relationship … and of course, no technical tools or inhibitions help [in that case].”
Spanish lawyer Mauro Jordan de la Peña said that in his own country, there is a lack of urgency among the police and judiciary to pursue the cases of online investment scam victims, because it is not an issue that triggers as much social alarm as other crimes.
“In Spanish society there’s a sense that, hey, if you are scammed because you wanted to earn a lot of money, then that’s on you,” Jordan said in an interview with OCCRP.
Source: OCCRP
Image: James O’Brien/OCCRP
This post by Stephen Kell, an academic at King’s College London’s Department of Informatics, was on the front page of Hacker News recently. It resonated with me, even though I’m not in the same position as him employment-wise. We all have a finite time on this earth, so it’s worth prioritising getting on and doing stuff that you deem important, without bureaucracy and other annoyances (like ‘business development’!) getting in the way.
It’s time to admit that I’m in a mess… It’s a little over ten years since I boldly presented one of my research goals at that 2014 conference. The reception was positive and gratifying. I still get occasional fan mail about the talk. So where’s the progress on those big ideas? There’s certainly some, which I could detail—now isn’t the time. But frankly, there’s not enough. In the past year I turned 40… in fact I’m about to turn 41 as I write this. It’s time to admit I’ve landed a long way from the place where that bright-eyed 30-year-old would have hoped his future self to end up. […]
If not there, then where am I? In short, I’m trapped in a mediocre, mismanaged version of academia that is turning me into a mediocre and (self-)mismanaged individual. The problem is far from one-way traffic: if I were a more brilliant or at least better self-managing individual, I could no doubt have done better. But for now, it’s the mess I’m in. I need to get out of it, somehow.
Although the academic life has felt like my vocation, my current experience of it is one I find suffocating. If you care about things that matter—truth, quality, learning, reason, knowledge, people, doing useful things with our short time on this planet—you are a poor fit for what most of our so-called universities have become in the UK. Three character traits will cause particular problems: caring too much, having values and having standards.
Looking around, what I seem to observe is that whereas others can hack it, it’s an atmosphere I find I am very poorly adapted to breathing. In short, far too much of my time is spent on regrettably meaningless tasks, and the incentives mostly point away from quality. I am trapped in only the bad quadrants of the Eisenhower matrix. To the extent that my mind is “in the institution”, it makes me feel pretty horrible: under-appreciated, over-measured, constantly bullshitted-to, serially misunderstood, encouraged to be a bureaucrat “system-gamer” and discouraged from both actually doing what I’m good at, and actually doing good. There is an enormous and exhausting cognitive dissonance generated by not only the stereotypical bureacracy but also the new, non-stereotypical corporate noise, the institutionally broken attitudes to teaching and the increasingly timewasterly tendencies of [organisations claiming to be] research funders.
It’s not all bad! There are still moments when it feels like my teaching is meaningful and my research time is going on things that matter. Those moments are just too few to sustain me, given the oter stuff. […]
If I’m not just to muddle on like this until I die or at least retire (it’s scarily little time until I can claim my pension!), there’s an imperative either to get out of this suffocating environment or at least to open up a vent… perhaps one large enough to crawl out of later. However, I’m not ready to Just Quit just yet. Being a citizen of the academic world is useful; I don’t have to go for a metaphorical knighthood. My new plan is to focusing more on basic sufficiency. I want to use my citizenship to do good. There is still some will in the machine to do good, even though the the default pathways increasingly strangle such impulses; walking out would squander this meagre but still valuable capital.
Source: Rambles around computer science
Image: ShareYaarNow
You should already subscribe to Kai Brach’s Dense Discovery newsletter but, if you haven’t yet had the pleasure, I’d like to introduce it by way of his opening to the latest issue.
I find the question “what do you do?” so difficult to answer. I find it difficult enough even explaining what WAO does, to be honest, given how much of a range of stuff we do for clients. So the suggest to reframe the question is a welcome one, and helps shifts our collective conversations away from hierarchical, company-centric ways of being.
The dinner party question we all dread and ask in equal measure: ‘What do you do?’ It’s a peculiar cultural shorthand that attempts to compress our entire existence into a job title and industry. The way we’ve elevated professional identity to the centrepiece of selfhood comes at a considerable cost, narrowing our understanding of value and connection to something that can be neatly added to LinkedIn.
Simone Stolzoff beautifully captures this over-identification with work in his recent TED talk. You might remember his book The Good Enough Job (featured in DD214), which examines this theme at length. In this condensed pitch for a less work-centric life, he reminds us that “we are all more than just workers. We’re parents and friends and citizens and artists and travellers and neighbours. Much like an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of stocks in their portfolio, we, too, benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our lives.”
Stolzoff offers three practical steps to help us ‘diversify’ our identities: creating time sanctuaries where work is forbidden, filling those spaces with activities that reinforce alternative identities, and joining communities that couldn’t care less about our professional achievements. It’s blindingly obvious advice, though it feels almost radical in our achievement-obsessed culture.
“If we want to develop more well-rounded versions of ourselves, if we want to build robust relationships and live in robust communities and have a robust society at large, we all must invest in aspects of our lives beyond work. We shouldn’t just work less because it makes us better workers. We should work less because it makes us better people.”
“This is about teaching our kids that their self-worth is not determined by their job title. This is about reinforcing the fact that not all noble work neatly translates to a line on a resume. This is about setting the example that we all have a responsibility to contribute to the world in a way beyond contributing to one organisation’s bottom line.”
And here’s a bit of dinner party advice that might just salvage our collective sanity: rather than asking ‘What do you do?’, Stolzoff suggests adding two small words: ‘What do you like to do?’
“Maybe you like to cook. Maybe you like to write. Maybe you do some of those things for work. Or maybe you don’t. ‘What do you like to do’ is a question that allows each of us to define ourselves on our own terms.”
In a world obsessed with productivity metrics and career trajectories, perhaps this tiny adjustment to our social script might help us recognise each other not just as economic units, but as the complex, multifaceted beings we truly are.
Source: Dense Discovery #328
Image: Antenna
At MozFest 2019, I revealed as part of a group discussion that I don’t use Meta’s products — including WhatsApp. A participant, who knew I have sporty kids, asked how I managed to organise their activities. “My wife uses Facebook and WhatsApp,” I said. “Oh, you outsource the labour?” was their withering reply.
Six years later, and I still don’t use WhatsApp and Hannah (my wife) still sorts all of that stuff out. Any time we’re having a disagreement, she does tend to bring this up as an additional mental burden. So I was interested in this article by Chloë Hamilton in The Guardian where she and her partner “swapped” mental loads for a week.
I recommend reading the whole thing. It probably won’t be what you expect, and it both provided me with some insights and confirmed some things I’d suspected all along. I’d direct you in particular to the bit (not quoted below) about when their kids head off to be looked after by their grandparents…
It starts with a discussion in the car, prompted by the washing up. It wasn’t done that morning. The laundry needs hanging up, too, and someone has forgotten to make the packed lunches. We need to pay the dog walker, fix the broken bath panel, work out why our toddler has started waking in the night and book our youngest in for a haircut. Then there’s a half-planned playdate to confirm, meals to plan and all those family WhatsApp group messages that need a response.
Historically, women in heterosexual relationships have carried the heft of the mental load, also known as cognitive household labour. This is the behind-the-scenes work, often intangible, that goes into running a household. It’s not just the jobs: it’s thinking about those jobs. The true extent of this work, invisible and embedded as it is, can be hard to define; an iceberg of tasks concealed beneath waves of tradition, expectation and stereotypes. It’s not just the doing, it’s the remembering, the realising, the anticipating, the assigning. It’s not just making packed lunches, it’s getting food in, making sure it’s nutritious, checking the lunchboxes are washed and ready. It’s knowing the toddler has gone off bananas and the baby can’t eat chunks of apple yet. This work is unpaid, unseen and, often, unappreciated.
[…]
We conclude, as we pull into the childminder’s, that if long-term change is the objective, talking about it with your partner isn’t just recommended, it is essential – and, actually, doesn’t at all nullify the purpose of the chat. Opening up a dialogue has allowed us to have a respectful, thoughtful and continuing conversation about how we are feeling and faring. We have made the invisible visible.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Helena Lopes
You’re not going to get many recommendations from me to sign up to a Substack-powered newsletter (why?) but I’m going to give you one today. I’m delighted to say that Northern Earth, a magazine I initially subscribed to on the recommendation of author Warren Ellis, is continuing under a new editor, and they have created a new monthly newsletter called The Hare.
Founded in 1979, Northern Earth is the world’s longest-running journal combining interests in archaeology, folklore, neoantiquarianism, earth mysteries, phenomenology and psychogeography – exploring the many ways in which people interact with place.
Don’t get me wrong, the community around the magazine is a broad church, so there’s some things in the magazine at which I raise an eyebrow. But, on the whole, I like alternative explanations of history and pre-history. As Hercule Poirot, the famous fictional detective once said, “If the little grey cells are not exercised, they grow the rust.”
Here are some links from the first issue of The Hare:
Read John Palmer’s new article at our website: A Saxon alignment and pagan cult site in Twente, the Netherlands
11,000-year-old Indigenous village uncovered near Sturgeon Lake, Canada [University of Saskatchewan]
[Podcast] Broken Veil – ‘A psychogeographic journey into the strangeness close at hand’
Image: from the inaugural issue of The Hare
I didn’t really want to share anything about US politics this week, but I can’t not share this thread from Roland Meyer about the Trump ‘Gaza Riviera’ video that you’ve probably seen by now. Or at least read about. It’s the first time I’ve come across Meyer, who is DIZH Bridge Professor in Digital Cultures and Arts at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
He says that sharing the video “without trying to understand how it shows our new normal” is problematic, but ignoring it isn’t an option either. I’m sharing his analysis of mainly because ‘platform realism’ is a useful term to avoid just vaguely gesturing to something as ‘AI generated’. The point is that creating this kind of aesthetic is easy and cheap in a world of consumer-grade AI tools which require no particular talent to use.
No-one thinks that this is real, the point is rather to provoke, distract, and demonstrate a brazen disregard for international law. It’s a fabrication of a different reality, something that is absolutely part of the fascist playbook. It started with the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ naming dispute, and continues from there. After all, when you’re trying to refute bullshit, you’re not doing anything else.
There is nothing crazy about this. This horrific video epitomizes the logic of current meme-fascism: it’s a colonization of the imagination that precedes and aestheticizes real neo-imperialist violence, dressed up in the glossy looks of stock imagery, influencer content and online scamming 1/
The vision, if you want to call it that, presented in this video is cheap, superficial, inconsistent and hardly capable of convincing, seducing or deceiving anyone. But that’s exactly the point: Trump doesn’t need to convince anyone, he can use his raw power. The video shows how little he cares 2/
Unlike 20th century propaganda, #platformrealism is not an aesthetic of seduction, but of brutal carelessness and blatant ignorance. The power of a video like this lies in the sloppiness of its means - anyone could produce it, without expertise, without investment, without even watching it 3/
Pointing out AI-induced glitches and hallucinations like the bearded dancers therefore seems to me to be beside the point. Such traditional critique of representation is helpless when those in power are no longer concerned with the details of representation, but only with ›flooding the zone 4/
Source: Bluesky
Image: BBC Verify
I discovered this via the Are.na newsletter. It’s a kind of social bookmarking and discovery service that strongly influenced some of the early iterations of MoodleNet (RIP).
Anyway, A Pattern Language has been referenced in multiple places I’ve paid attention to over the years, but the book is usually expensive. That’s why I’m pleased that there’s now this interactive version, which links the ideas it contains to one another, as a hypertext.
A Pattern Language is the second in a series of books which describe an entirely new attitude to architecture and planning. The books are intended to provide a complete working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building, and planning—an alternative which will, we hope, gradually replace current ideas and practices.
My friends and I have long been fans of this book, and attempt to use its patterns in our own homes and spaces. The book is 1,200 pages long, with countless intertextual connections. It always seemed ripe for mapping and distilling the patterns together more interactively. All text, except this section, is excerpted from the book.
Source: A Pattern Language
Sometimes, the internet reminds you how weird and wonderful humans are. On this occasion, it was the above image which people replied to with their best slogans. I’m including some examples from a dedicated Reddit thread, but I think first prize has to go to Giles Turnbull who captioned the image “Cracking cheese, Gromit.”
Absolutely perfect. Nailed it.
“I have a cunning plan” (Humannylies)
“Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.” (LondonEntUK)
“Nice to see you… to see you, nice” (Naturally_Fragrant)
“…there aren’t no party like an S Club party.” (nasted)
“You’ve been Tangoed” (LeicsBob)
Source: Reddit
Years ago, when I was a teacher, we had an influx of Polish children to our school. After a couple of weeks, one of the senior leaders gave the new pupils a map of the school and asked them to add a smiley face, a neutral face, or an unhappy face depending on how they felt about those spaces. Many of them couldn’t speak English, so it was a really important way of starting to figure out how, where, and why they were feeling included or excluded.
I was reminded of this when reading this post about “maps as conversations”. It’s a way of understanding how different groups understand and move through spaces. It’s a way of having multiple maps of the territory, rather than just the official versions.
I’m having a chat with Tom Watson, one of the authors next week, so I’m looking forward to finding out more. Especially as one of the areas used as an example is Sheffield, where I went to university as an undergraduate.
What started as an idea that “everything happens in a place” has turned into a practical, replicable initiative. Through the power of citizen-led mapping, Sheffield’s communities have already begun to shift how we talk about places, how we deliver services, and how we make decisions together.
We think other areas now have the chance to adapt and benefit from this model. By grounding policy and practice in how people actually live, connect and identify, localities can cultivate greater participation, more cohesive relationships and a richer sense of community ownership.
Source: Data for Action
Image: (from the post}
You can definitely tell how old someone is by the way they use LinkedIn. If someone announces a job move by saying they have “some personal news” they are definitely Gen X. I’m a Xennial so just super-awkward on every social platform; I’m torn between wanting to look/sound “grown up” and just wanting to share all of the things everywhere.
LinkedIn, though, is absolutely crushing it in terms of engagement and revenue. If you think about it, the main feed is very different to how it used to be, and that’s a function of younger generations entering the workforce, as well as more people working from home. It’s difficult to remember to be super-professional when you’re still in your running gear and you’ve just hung up the washing between Zoom calls.
As this article discusses, the interplay between the generations on LinkedIn is really interesting. It’s more likely that older generations are believers in working from an office in a hierarchical structure; it’s more likely that younger generations are opposed to both of those things. I still find it an annoying place to kind-of-have-to hang out. I’d prefer it didn’t exist, or at least prefer that it had a different overall vibe. But, while it is the main professional network, I’m going to share all of the things there.
Last week, Microsoft revealed that the site is seeing record engagement, with comments on the platform up 37% year over year. Moreover, millions of people have now signed up for LinkedIn Premium; the company revealed that it’s earned more than $2 billion in revenue from its AI-laden premium service in the last 12 months. Indeed, LinkedIn more broadly contributes healthily to Microsoft’s bottom line — the division delivered $16 billion in revenue in 2024, more than The New York Times, Zoom, and Docusign put together.
[…]
Younger generations tend to reflexively reject spending time on the same online social media platforms as their parents (here’s looking at you, Facebook). But, unfortunately for the youth, you do tend to turn into your parents as you age, and LinkedIn is no exception. As Gen Z has entered the workforce, they seem to have no problem with the site, with the number of American Gen Z users on LinkedIn estimated to have risen 14% in 2024, per Insider Intelligence. But those younger users post on the site in a very different way.
Once upon a time, personal or honest takes were regarded as awkward and professionally desperate on LinkedIn. But being a so-called “thinkfluencer” in 2025 is increasingly a strategic way to boost your “personal brand” (should you desire to have such a thing). After a number of conversations with small business owners over the last few months, the reality is that posting every single day on LinkedIn, even if it feels uncomfortable at times, is a bona fide way of bringing in leads.
[…]
With more and more people dipping their toes into remote working, definitions of what’s socially acceptable to share at work are also changing. It’s this interplay between generations and workforces (work-from-home vs. work-from-office), and the fact that some make serious money from the platform, that makes LinkedIn — for lack of a better word — weird.
Source: Sherwood
Image: Never Dull Studio
Writing is a form of extended thinking. Or, at least it is for me. Which is why I think that blogging, either here on Thought Shrapnel, on my personal blog, on the WAO blog, or occasionally over at ambiguiti.es, is so useful.
Giles Thomas points out that a blog is the equivalent of showing your contributions to open source software via a GitHub profile. It’s a good analogy: by working openly and sharing your thinking, you create a link for every significant thought or connection you’ve made between ideas. That means, in my case at least, I can search for my name and the topic, and a bunch of things come up.
Although I haven’t included it in the quotation below, the original rationale for Thomas' post is whether it’s worth blogging in the age of AI. It’s an unequivocal YES for me, but then I’m the kind of person who donated my doctoral thesis to the public domain. Nobody “owns” ideas, so by blogging you’re helping contribute to the sum total of human knowledge.
I said that you will be vanishingly unlikely to make a name for yourself with blogging on its own. But that doesn’t mean it’s pointless from a career perspective. You’re building up a portfolio of writing about topics that interest you. Imagine you’re in a job interview and are asked about X. You reply with the details you know, and add “but I blogged about that in detail a while back, shall I send you a link later?” Or if you’re aiming to close a contract with a potential consulting client in a particular area – wouldn’t it be useful to send them a list of links showing your thoughts on aspects of exactly that topic?
Your GitHub profile shows your contributions to open source and lets people know how well you can code. But your blog shows your contributions to knowledge, and shows how well you can think. That’s valuable!
Source: Giles' blog
Image: Markus Winkler
For those unaware, for the past 15 years, Jay Rayner has been the food critic for The Guardian and its sister publication, The Observer. The latter has a ‘food monthly’ supplement which is usually referred to by the acronym OFM.
In Rayner’s last column for OFM he dispenses lots of fantastic advice. Here’s are my favourite parts, some of which can be used as metaphors and are therefore more widely applicable.
Individual foods are not pharmaceuticals; just eat a balanced diet. There is nothing you can eat or drink that will detoxify you; that’s what your liver and kidneys are for. No healthy person needs to wear a glucose spike monitor; it’s a fad indulged by the worried well. As is the cobblers of being interested in “wellness”, because nobody is interested in “illness”. People have morals but food doesn’t, so don’t describe dishes as “dirty”. And stop it with the whole “clean eating” thing. It’s annoying and vacuous.
[…]
Tipping should be abolished. It’s wrong that restaurant staff should be dependent on the mood of the customer for the size of their wage. They should be paid properly. It works in Japan, France and Australia. It can work in the UK. All new restaurants should employ someone over 50 to check whether the print on the menu is big enough to be read, the lighting bright enough for it to be read by and the seats comfortable enough for a lengthy meal. If a waiter has to explain the “concept” behind a menu there is something wrong with the menu.
Source: The Observer
Image: Damien Santos
Dave Winer has launched something called WordLand which uses RSS as the federated specification underpinning a federated social network. This is instead of ActivityPub, which underpins the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.) or ATProto, which powers Bluesky.
I immediately ran into an error about API calls, with no suggestion how to fix it. I’m also not entirely sure how textcasting is different to just, blogging? This approach seems a bit post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Just as with something like Delta Chat which piggybacks on email for chat functionality, this uses blogs for microblogging 🤔
Thanks to John Johnston for bringing this to my attention, and for pointing me towards PootleWriter which looks simple and great for quickly getting things on the web.
WordLand is designed to be the kind of editor you use in a social app like Bluesky or Mastodon, but with most of the features of textcasting.
WordLand is where we start to boot up a simple social net using only RSS as the protocol connecting users. Rather than wait for ActivityPub and AT Proto to get their acts together. I think we can do it with feeds and start off with immediate interop without the complexity of federation. I call it the feediverse. It’s not a joke, although it may incite a smile and a giggle. And that’s ok.
Source: Scripting News
Image: Juno Jo
There is enough going on in the world and in my life at the moment that Thought Shrapnel does not need to deal with. Instead, dear reader, I present to you PJ Holden’s microfiction newsletter, A4. Just like Jay Springett’s Start Select Reset zine.
A4 is a single A4 sheet of paper with seven little nano-fiction stories. The sheet is designed to be printed and folded in such a way that you end up with a lovely little standee with a pulp fiction like cover. (Or you could just read them on screen! but I promise, it’s worth the effort!)
Issue Zero was my test fire to see if the idea stood up to more than casual scrutiny and so far, a surprising number of people have downloaded it (I have the stats!)
Source: PJ Holden’s Blog
Image: from the author’s post
Matt Muir links to My Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani, which she adapted from Buster Benson. He got the idea from Tim Urban. You can create your own version at weeksofyour.life.
I like the idea of representing one’s life like this, for several reasons. First, as Urban’s initial post points out:
Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.
Personally, 2025 has been terrible for me so far. But we’re only a few weeks in! The rest of it could be great, who knows?
The boxes can also be a reminder that life is forgiving. No matter what happens each week, you get a new fresh box to work with the next week. It makes me want to skip the New Year’s Resolutions—they never work anyway—and focus on making New Week’s Resolutions every Sunday night. Each blank box is an opportunity to crush the week—a good thing to remember.
Source: (various)
Image: Screenshot from Gina Trapani’s site
I’ve been listening to an interesting interview over the past couple of days where Rick Rubin, the legendary music producer, interviews Will Smith. One of the things Smith says is that people have a real “thirst” for nostalgia at the moment, wanting to go back to a time when things were a little bit better.
This article by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic looks at some of the research into this topic, noting that that reflecting on past times, even if they were tough, gives them a story, a sense of self, and a sense of solidarity with others. Ultimately, it seems, nostalgia is all about creating a sense of security, which absolutely makes sense.
Nostalgia for terrible things may sound absurd, but many people experience it, for reasons that speak to the way people make meaning of their lives. The central reason for this phenomenon, according to researchers who study nostalgia, is that humans look to our past selves to make sense of our present. Reflecting on the challenging times we’ve endured provides significance and edification to a life that can otherwise seem pointlessly difficult. The past was tough, we think, but we survived it, so we must be tough too.
To be sure, part of the explanation is that people tend to romanticize the past, remembering it more rosily than it actually was. Thanks to something called the “fading affect bias,” negative feelings about an event evaporate much more quickly than positive ones. As a difficult experience recedes in time, we start to miss its happier aspects and gloss over the challenges. And nostalgia is usually prompted by a feeling of dissatisfaction with the present, experts say, making the past seem better by comparison.
[…]
There are few large, robust studies on this topic, but some experimental research has shown that nostalgia provides a feeling of authenticity and a sense of connection between your past and present selves. Because of this, we often get nostalgic for consequential moments in our lives. “People are nostalgic for things that give their lives meaning or help them feel important,” says Andrew Abeyta, a psychology professor at Rutgers University.
[…]
Reminiscing about a difficult experience reminds you that at least you survived, and that your loved ones came to your aid. “The fact that those people did those things for you, or were there for you, reassures you that you have your self-worth,” Batcho said. Research by the psychologist Tim Wildschut and his colleagues found that people who wrote about a nostalgic experience went on to feel higher self-esteem than a control group, and they also felt more secure in their relationships.
Source: The Atlantic
Image: Jon Tyson
Warren Ellis comments on fractured and fragmented the world is now in terms of keeping up with what other people are thinking and producing. You can’t trust the algorithms any more, and there are precious few people doing the curatorial work across multiple streams — which is why I appreciate people like Jason Kottke, Tina Roth Eisenberg, Stephen Downes, Matt Muir and, of course, Ellis himself.
I was talking to a publisher friend last night about Patreon, on which he spends a lot of time looking at comics creators. I do not – I didn’t find out until last night that I still have an account on there, and I’m still not sure how that’s possible. Anyway. His thing was: he sees lots of work-in-progress and one page updates and stuff there, but how has it not become a primary delivery system for digital comics? Like, for your membership fee, or an extra dollar or whatever, here’s the first issue of my comic for you to read online or download, and the next one will be on this day next month, and so on. Maybe there’s a limited physical print edition that I’ll offer for sale a month later. And there’s no deal for collection, so maybe you’ll never see this again.
(It occurred to me this morning that any writer could do that with ebooks, too, and then whack them out to Amazon two months later.)
My thing was, does anyone really want to fracture common culture and a shared marketplace any more than it already is? And an hour later, I thought, common culture is a delusion of my age. Common platforms, perhaps, but platforms are contingent and temporary. We are all “creators” now.
Is there even a digital comics store and reading app that a majority of people use now?
(There is a supposed quote by Pericles I heard years ago but never sourced: “All things good should flow into the boulevard.”)
This note from my friend, which I summarise here to preserve it for myself, has gotten me thinking about that entire space. It’s less walled-off from the world than Kickstarter-style crowdfunding, perhaps? (I think Kickstarter and Backerkit et al are great: my concern over work crowdfunded in that style doesn’t transmit anything into the general culture. Again, probably a fixed idea from my age and background.) I’m always wondering how much great work I might be missing simply because I can’t find it browsing around real or virtual shelves.
Source: Warren Ellis Ltd
Image: Jonas Stolle
Jessica Prendergrast is part of Onion Collective, which undertook an experimental research project last year funded by the Joseph Roundtree Foundation. In this first of a series of four essays, Prendergrast explores new models for transforming systems beyond capitalism, ultimately coming up with a new three-part Ebbing/Evolving/Emerging model they name Onion Collective’s Petal Model of Regenerative Transition.
I like the emphasis on language and metaphor in shaping our understanding of change, as well as the potential for innovation at the periphery of society. It’s a hopeful piece, which is what we need in such times. I’ve included the image of the model which gives some examples, to aid with understanding.
At Onion Collective, positioned as we are in the ‘niche’, the further we delved into system transformation or replacement, the more conscious we became of how all these models, without fail, position the radical as outliers — trying to break in — rather than centre-ing them as dominant forces of change, reinforcing their radicalism as oddity. Whether unintentionally or a symptom of internalised capitalism, this seemed to reflect how anything which challenges the status quo is targeted as ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’. Rebecca Solnit explores this phenomenon in her extraordinary book, Hope in the Dark. She explains how those who are marginalised, especially when they try to push through to the centre, are often portrayed as dangerous and unsavoury, defamed and even criminalised. This was as true for civil rights activists, suffragettes, and abolitionists, as it is now with climate activists and post growth academics. They are portrayed as rabble on the fringe, somehow both naive (or swampy or woke depending on your era) and dangerous — a kind of system-level dismissal or sniggering at those suggesting an alternative to the mainstream, and one which feels particularly galling when that mainstream is creaking (burning, flooding, dying) under the weight of the damage it has created.
[…]
To reflect where the radical power for change really lies, as a starting point, we wanted to convey emerging and alternative futures practitioners less like oddities or outliers and more like a new beginning at the heart of the model. We wanted a model that better represented the viewpoint and power of all those under the waterline (whether in the global south or left-behind places) and that could begin to change what was ‘thinkable’. In the metaphorical battle for hearts and minds, we wanted to find a way to position the dominant but damaging paradigm as on the edge — a far more logical placement in the sense of the ‘extremeness’ of a position that is destroying itself and the planet. And, we put the alternative future in the centre of the action rather than the outskirts of possibility.
[…]
Intentionally, the three rounds of petals are layered up on top of one another reflecting that the new lives alongside the old even as it envelops it and, as we learned from Gibson-Graham, that all sorts of non-dominant regime activity is always happening alongside the mainstream. The layering and overlap also recognises that most of those building alternative futures are operating in what we have described previously as a liminal space. They tend to be working in multiple arenas all at once, and balancing the contradictions and complexities of such all the time. They may be doing a fair bit of ebbing, evolving and emerging work at once, by virtue of existing in the contradictory reality of late-stage capitalism.
The revolution, it turns out, is boringly iterative.
[…]
An example version here shows a host of areas added. In this case, these are petal sets that felt especially relevant to our practice at Onion Collective. For example, our work is at the nexus of culture, community and climate work; it takes in explorations of land use and ownership; knowledge production and sharing and alternative demonstrations of economics in place and at a systems level.
[…]
Viewed from the centre of this flower, where it’s all fresh and new and emergent, far away from the browning decaying edges of the old regime’s petals, it becomes easier to imagine the end of capitalism. From here, to overplay and mix up the metaphors, the ice above the waterline could melt away. From here, looking at all the activity and dreams and hopes that are coalescing under the surface, it’s not so difficult to conceive that maybe, we’ve just been looking in the wrong place, blinded by the light of capitalism. After all, the history of the world tells us that dominant paradigms dominate only until they don’t anymore. Eventually they give way, either gently or in turbulence, to something else. Change is inevitable, new petals will unfurl and a different kind of flower will come into bloom.
Source: Onion Collective
Image: taken from the article
As I have written about several times over the years, I am a migraineur. They have been with me all my adult life, and I can’t really remember what life was like without them. Preventative medication makes me drowsy, so along with some relieving triptans my only relief is rest.
I’ve sent this article in Nature to my immediate family, who seem to confuse certain migraine phases with neurodiversity. The diagram below, in particular, is extremely valuable to anyone who is a migraineur, or who knows one. It’s easy to focus on the visual disturbances and the cranial pain, but there’s much more to it than that.
And, as I’ve discussed before, post-migraine is an extremely fertile time for me, with it being the perfect time for creative pursuits, including coming up with new or innovative ideas. That being said, I’m not entirely sure that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, which is why I would absolutely explore new drugs which help prevent them in novel ways.
For ages, the perception of migraine has been one of suffering with little to no relief. In ancient Egypt, physicians strapped clay crocodiles to people’s heads and prayed for the best. And as late as the seventeenth century, surgeons bored holes into people’s skulls — some have suggested — to let the migraine out. The twentieth century brought much more effective treatments, but they did not work for a significant fraction of the roughly one billion people who experience migraine worldwide.
Now there is a new sense of progress running through the field, brought about by developments on several fronts. Medical advances in the past few decades — including the approval of gepants and related treatments — have redefined migraine as “a treatable and manageable condition”, says Diana Krause, a neuropharmacologist at the University of California, Irvine.
[…]
Researchers are trying to discover what triggers a migraine-prone brain to flip into a hyperactive state, causing a full-blown attack, or for that matter, what makes a brain prone to the condition. A new and broader approach to research and treatment is needed, says Arne May, a neurologist at the University Medical Center Hamburg–Eppendorf in Germany. To stop migraine completely and not just headache pain, he says, “we need to create new frameworks to understand how the brain activates the whole system of migraine”.
[…]
Researchers found that changes in the brain’s activity start appearing at what’s known as the premonitory phase, which begins hours to days before an attack (see ‘Migraine is cyclical’). The premonitory phase is characterized by a swathe of symptoms, including nausea, food cravings, faintness, fatigue and yawning. That’s often followed by a days-long migraine attack phase, which comes with overwhelming headache pain and other physical and psychological symptoms. After the attack subsides, the postdrome phase has its own associated set of symptoms that include depression, euphoria and fatigue. An interictal phase marks the time between attacks and can involve symptoms as well.
[…]
The limbic system is a group of interconnected brain structures that process sensory information and regulate emotions.. Studies that scanned the brains of people with migraine every few days for several weeks showed that hypothalamic connectivity to various parts of the brain increases just before a migraine attack begins, then collapses during the headache phase.
May and others think that the hypothalamus loses control over the limbic system about two days before the attack begins, and it results in changes to conscious experiences that might explain symptoms such as light- and sound-sensitivity, or cognitive impairments. At the same time, the breakdown of hypothalamic control puts the body’s homeostatic balance out of kilter, which explains why symptoms such as fatigue, nausea, yawning and food cravings are common when a migraine is building up, says Krause.
Migraine researchers now talk of a hypothetical ‘migraine threshold’ in which environmental or physiological triggers tip brain activity into a dysregulated state.
Source: Nature
Images: taken from the article
I quoted with approval from the first part of R.H. Lossin’s essay in e-flux on “the relationship between art, artificial intelligence, and emerging forms of hegemony.” In the second part, she puts forward an even more explicitly marxist critique, suggesting that being human involves both embodiment and emotion — something that AI can only ever imitate.
What I particularly appreciated in this second part was the focus on domination. I could have quoted more below, including one particularly juicy bit about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, NFTs, and exploitation. You’ll just have to go and read the whole thing.
The liberal impulse to redress historic wrongs by progressively expanding the public sphere is nothing to scoff at. There couldn’t be a better time for marxists to climb down and admit the social value of including someone other than white heterosexuals in public discourse and cultural production. That said, counterhegemonic generative AI is a fantasy even if you define the diversification of therapy as counterhegemonic. In addition to causing disproportionate environmental harm, these elaborate experiments with computer subjectivity are always an exercise in labor exploitation and colonial domination. Materially, they are dependent on the maintenance and expansion of the extractive arrangements established by colonialism and the ongoing concentration of wealth and intellectual resources in the hands of very few men; ideologically they require increasing alienation and the elimination of difference. At best, these experiments offer us a pale reflection of intellectual engagement and collective social life. At worst, they contribute to the destruction of diverse communities and the very conditions for the solidarity required for real resistance.
[…]
The suggestion that a self-replicating taxonomy can produce knowledge and insights generally formulated over the course of a human life seems to defy reason. But this is exactly the claim being made by […] techno-boosterism at large: that a sophisticated enough machine can replicate the most complex human creations. This is, of course, just how machine production has always worked and evolved—each generation witnessing the disappearance of a set of skills and body of knowledge thought to be uniquely human. Art making, writing, and other highly skilled intellectual endeavors are not inherently more human, precious, or worthy of preservation than any skilled manufacture subsumed by the assembly lines of the past century. In the case of generative AI and other recent developments in machine learning, though, we are witnessing both the subsumption of cultural production by machines and the enclosure of vast swathes of subjective experience. Dramatic changes to production have always been accompanied by fundamental changes in the organization of social life beyond the workplace, but this is a qualitatively different phenomenon.
[…]
In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx observed that machinery is not just a means of production but a form of domination. In a mechanized, industrial economy, “labor appears […] as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system […] as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery.” This apparent totality of machinery “confronts [the worker’s] individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labor confronts living labor […] as the power which rules it.” […] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described popular entertainment as a relentless repetition of the rhythms of factory production; a way for the workplace to haunt the leisure time of the off-duty worker. The consumption of generative AI as entertainment seems like another order of psychic submission.
Source: e-flux
Image: Rashaad Newsome Studio (taken from the essay)
Ben Werdmuller points to this article and says that “self-sovereignty should be available to all” because “if only wealthy people can own their own stuff, the movement is meaningless.”
If I’m understanding the arguments that PJ Onori is making (below) and Ben is making (implicitly) then they’re eliding between “owning your data” and having things “on a site you control.” I’ve got a microserver under the desk in my office. All of the data on there is “mine” in that I can physically pick it up and take it elsewhere. But… is this what we’re advocating for? It seems unrealistic.
What seems more realistic is having your stuff “on a site you control.” But what does “control” mean in this context? For most people it’s not technical control, because they won’t have the knowledge or skills. Instead, it’s power, which is the thing I think is missing from most arguments around Open Source and Free Software. The missing piece, I would argue, is creating democratic organisations such as cooperatives to give people together a way of pushing back against the combined power of Big Tech and nation states. Doing it individually is a fool’s errand.
PS The reason you’ll never hear me talk of “self-sovereignty” is mainly because of this book co-written by the father of arch-Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg.
It’s 2025. Read.cv is shutting down. WordPress is on fire. Twitter has completely melted down. Companies are changing their content policies en masse. Social networks are becoming increasingly icy towards anything outside of their walled garden. Services are using the content you post to feed proprietary LLMs. Government websites appear to be purging data. It’s a wild time.
[…]
Now, more than ever, it’s critical to own your data. Really own it. Like, on your hard drive and hosted on your website. Ideally on your own server, but one step at a time.
[…]
Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.
Source: PJ Onori’s blog
Image: Alexander Sinn
I think it says something about the state of the world that articles have to be written encouraging us to hang out with others, and indeed how to do so. But here we are.
It’s easy to live an over-scheduled life, especially if you have kids. That makes it particularly difficult to make, or encourage other people to make, unscheduled calls. But that kind of thing is the spice of life. I need more serendipity in mine, for sure.
Nowadays… unstructured moments seem fewer and farther between. Socializing nearly always revolves around a specific activity, often out of the house, and with an implied start and end time. Plans are Tetris-ed into a packed calendar and planned well in advance, leaving little room for spontaneity. Then, when we inevitably feel worn out or like our social battery’s drained, we retreat inward under the pretense of self-care; according to pop culture, true rest can only happen at home, alone, often in a bubble bath or bed.
Of course, solo veg time can be rejuvenating (and necessary), but I think we’ve lost sight of how relaxing with loved ones can also fill our cup, and make us feel less lonely. And after talking with a couple of experts on the topic, I know I’m not the only one. […]
Loose, liminal time with others used to be baked into life. It’s been slowly wedged out thanks to smartphones, go-go-go lifestyles, a fiercely individualistic society, and a host of other cultural shifts
[…]
Because there’s less pressure to perform or meet expectations, free-flowing togetherness also encourages authenticity, Dr. Stratnyer adds—and the ability to be your true self is no small thing. Social psychology researchers have found that showing up authentically in close relationships improves self-esteem; lowers levels of anxiety, depression, and stress; and is essential to building trusting, stable, satisfying relationships.
[…]
It can be as easy as saying, “Come over and let’s just hang out” or “Drop by whenever! I have no plans and would love to catch up.” When you extend invites like this, “you signal that the focus is on enjoying each other’s company rather than completing a list of activities,” Dr. Hafeez says. “With no rigid agenda, people are free to explore whatever feels right. The beauty of this kind of get-together is that things can unfold naturally, creating unforgettable memories.”
Source: SELF
Image: Javier Allegue Barros
In his most recent newsletter, Warren Ellis mentioned something that I’ve been feeling, but feeling somewhat guilty about. Namely: it’s difficult to carve out space to live a flourishing life when you spend most of your days avoiding bad news.
Yes, I’m sharing some of it here — or at least, commentaries on some of it. How could I not? My feeds feature little else but people throwing their hands in the air about democracy and/or AI. But I think think thi sis good advice from Ellis.
Thing is, not only is the news all the bloody same, all about the same country and the same handful of main characters, and every news service reports all the incremental updates to the same bloody stories every sixty seconds: but that constant battering tide of zone-flooding shit compresses time and shrinks space to think. And I want this year to feel like a year and not three bloody weeks.
It’s not about “taking a break from the news,” which various newsletters have suggested is now A Thing. And, you know, if you live in certain places right now, taking a break from the news might feel a luxury at best and a wilful ignoring of alarm bells at worst. On a single evening last week I talked to three people setting plans to bug out of the US..
It’s more about putting the news in its damn place and creating more space to live in.
Source: Orbital Operations
Image: Utsav Srestha
I said last week there are more historical authoritarian regimes to compare what’s happening around the world to than just Nazi Germany. I’m sick of my news feeds being full of people freaking out about what’s happening, as if this hasn’t been going on for years now.
I’m a reader of The Guardian and subscribe to the weekly print edition. But I’m finding the pointing-and-staring a little grating, which is why I appreciate this from Zoe Williams. I appreciate Carole Cadwalladr’s candid articles even more — although she does tend to post them on the Nazi-platforming Substack.
Like many people, I often feel as if I grew up with the Michael Rosen poem that starts: “I sometimes fear that / people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress.” In fact, it was written in 2014, but it was such a neat distillation that it instantly joined the canon of words that had always existed, right up there with clouds being lonely and parents fucking you up. Obviously, fascism arrives as your friend. How else would it arrive?
[…]
Between 1933 and 1939, the journalist Charlotte Beradt compiled The Third Reich of Dreams, in which she transcribed the nightmares of citizens from housemaids to small-business owners, then grouped them thematically, analysed them, and smuggled them to the US. They were published in 1968. A surprising, poignant number of them were about people dreaming that it was forbidden to dream, then freaking out in the dream because they knew they were illegitimately dreaming. There were amazingly prescient themes, of hyper-surveillance by the state before it had even begun, of barbarous violence, again, before it had started. But the paralysis theme was possibly the most recurrent and striking – people’s limbs frozen in Sieg Heils, voices frozen into silence, motifs of inaction from the most trivial to the most all-encompassing.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Mika Baumeister
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Updates (23rd Feb):
I should imagine many people who read Thought Shrapnel also read Stephen Downes' OLDaily, so may already have seen this by Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed. What interested me was the acronym SNARF, which is as good as any for being a short way of differentiating between centralised, for-profit, highly algorithmic social networks, and their opposite.
The quotation below comes from the The Anti-SNARF Manifesto, which is linked from the sign-up page for a new social network which features an illustration of an island. That’s interesting symbolism; I wonder if it will use a protocol such as ActivityPub (which underpins Fediverse apps such as Mastodon) or ATProto (which is used by Bluesky)? It would be a bit of a ballsy move to start completely from scratch.
Given the number of boosts and favourites I’ve had on my Fediverse post asking people to add a content warning for things relating to US politics, I’d think that moderation is something which is a potential differentiator. People neither want a completely straight reverse-chronological feed, it would seem, but nor do they want to feel manipulated by an opaque algorithm. I’ll be following this with interest and I have, of course, signed up to be notified when it launches.
SNARF stands for Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear. SNARF is the kind of content that evolves when a platform asks an AI to maximize usage. Content creators need to please the AI algorithms or they become irrelevant. Millions of creators make SNARF content to stay in the feed and earn a living.
We are all familiar with this kind of content, especially those of us who are chronically online. Content creators exaggerate stakes to make their content urgent and existential. They manufacture novelty and spin their content as unprecedented and unique. They manipulate anger to drive engagement via outrage. They hack retention by withholding information and promising a payoff at the end of a video. And they provoke fear to make people focus with urgency on their content. Every piece of content faces ruthless Darwinian competition so only SNARF has the ability to be successful, even if it is inaccurate, hateful, fake, ethically dubious, and intellectually suspect.
This dynamic is causing many different types of content to evolve into versions of the same thing. Once you understand this you can see how much of our society, culture, and politics are downstream from big tech’s global SNARF machines. The political ideas that break through, from both Democrats and Republicans, need to be shaped into SNARF to spread. Through this lens, MAGA and “woke” are the same thing! They both are versions of political ideas that spread through raw negative emotion, outrage, and novelty. The news stories and journalism that break through aren’t the most important stories, but rather the stories that can be shaped into SNARF. This is why it seems like every election, every new technology, every global conflict has the potential to end our way of life, destroy democracy, or set off a global apocalypse! It is not a coincidence that no matter what the message is, it always takes the same form, namely memetically optimized media that maximizes stakes and novelty, provokes anger, drives retention, and instills fear. The result is an endless stream of addictive content that leaves everyone feeling depressed, scared, and dissatisfied.
[…]
But there is some hope, despite the growing revenue and usage of the big social media platforms. We are beginning to see the first cracks that suggest there might be an opportunity to fight back. A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the majority of respondents would prefer to live in a world where TikTok and Instagram did not exist! There was generally a feeling of being compelled to use these projects because of FOMO, social pressure, and addiction. A large portion of users said they would pay money for TikTok and Instagram to not exist, suggesting these products have negative utility for many people. This challenges traditional economics which posits that consumers choosing a product means it provides positive utility. Instead, social media companies are using AI to manipulate consumer behavior for their own ends, not the benefit of the consumer. This aligns with what these researchers suspect is happening, namely that “companies introduce features that exacerbate non-user utility and diminish consumer welfare, rather than enhance it, increasing people’s need for a product without increasing the utility it delivers to them.”
Source: The Anti-SNARF Manifesto
Image: cropped from the background image on the above website
I think what Scott Galloway is saying here is that unfettered capitalism, which allows addicting people to products detrimental to their health, is a bad thing? That seems pretty obvious.
What I think Americans are missing, to be honest, is a way of saying that they want ‘socialism’ without it being equated with ‘communism’. I lots of tortuous statements about ‘post-capitalism’ and other terms. But the rest of the world undrestands socialism as balancing government intervention for the health and flourishing of citizens as being ‘socialism’, not ‘communism’.
The world’s most valuable resource isn’t data, compute, oil, or rare earth metals; it’s dopa, i.e., the fuel of the addiction economy, which runs the most valuable companies in history. Addiction has always been a component of capitalism — nothing rivals the power of craving to manufacture demand and support irrational margins.
[…]
Historically, the most valuable companies turn dopa into consumption. Over the last 100 years, 15 of the top 30 companies by cumulative compound return have been pillars of the addiction economy. The compounders cluster in tobacco (Altria +265,528,900%), the food industrial complex (Coca-Cola +12,372,265%), pharma (Wyeth +5,702,341%), and retailers (Kroger +2,834,362%) that sell both substances and treatments. To predict which companies will be the top compounders over the next century, consider this: Eight of the world’s 10 most valuable businesses turn dopa into attention, or make picks and shovels for these dopa merchants.
[…]
Now that everyone has a cellphone, we spend 70% less time with our friends than we did a decade ago. We’re addicted to our phones, and even when we’re not seeking our fix, our phones seek us out — notifying us on average 46 times per day for adults and 237 times per day for teens. In college, I spent too much time smoking pot and watching Planet of the Apes, but when I decided to venture on campus, my bong and Cornelius didn’t send me notifications.
[…]
We’re hard-wired for addiction. We’re also wired for conflict, as competing for scarce resources has shaped our neurological system to swiftly detect, assess, and respond to threats — often before we’re aware of them. As technology advances, our wiring makes us more powerful and more vulnerable. We produce dopa monsters at internet speed. We can wage war at a velocity and scale that risks extinction in the blink of an eye.
Source: No Mercy / No Malice
Image: Mishal Ibrahim
In this wind-ranging article, Venkatesh Rao discusses a number of things, including the unfolding Musk/DOGE coup. I’m ignoring that for the moment, as anything I write about it will be out of date by next week. The two parts I found most interesting from Rao’s piece were: (i) his comparison of people who tolerate inefficiency and interruption versus those who don’t, and (ii) his assertion that burnout comes from not being able to exercise integrity.
The two are related, I think. When you have to do things a particular way, subsuming your identity and values to someone else’s, it denies a core part of who you are as a person. While it’s relatively normal to self-censor to present oneself as a particular type of person, doing so in a way which is in conflict with your values is essentially a Jekyll/Hyde problem. And we all know what happened at the end of that story.
A big tell of whether you are an “open-door” type person is whether you tolerate a high degree of apparent inefficiency, interruption, and refractory periods of reflection that look like idleness. All are signs that your mental doors are open and are taking in new input. Especially dissenting input that can easily be interpreted as disloyal or traitorous by a loyalty-obsessed paranoid mind. Input that forces you to stop acting and switch to reflecting for a while.
Conversely, if you’re all about “efficiency” and a “maniacal sense of urgency” and a desperate belief that your “first principles” are all you need, you will eventually pay the price. A playbook that worked great once will stop working. Even the most powerful set of first principles that might be driving you will leave you with an exhausted paradigm and nowhere to go.
[…]
What truly burns people out is not that their boss is too demanding, hot-tempered, or even sadistic. What burns people out is not being allowed to exercise their integrity instincts. Being asked to turn off or delegate their moral compass to others. Plenty of people have the courage, the desperation, the ambition, or all three, to deal with demanding and scary bosses. But not many people can indefinitely suspend integrity instincts without being traumatized and burning out.
Source: Contraptions
Image: Danylo Suprun
The concept of ‘intelligence’ is a slippery one. It’s a human construct and, as such, privileges not only our own species, but those humans who at any given time have power and control over what counts as ‘intelligent’. There have been moves, especially recently, to ascribe intelligence to species that we don’t commonly eat, such as dolphins and crows.
But what about animals humans do eat? As a vegetarian I regularly feel guilty for consuming eggs and dairy; what kind of suffering am I causing sentient animals? But, I console myself, at least I don’t eat them any more.
A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, according to Emerson, but it is useful to have a consistent and philosophically-sound position on things. This article by Sally Adee is a pretty read, but worthwhile. It not only covers animal intelligence, but that of plants, fungi, and (of course!) machines.
A small but growing number of philosophers, physicists and developmental biologists say that, instead of continually admitting new creatures into the category of intelligence, the new findings are evidence that there is something catastrophically wrong with the way we understand intelligence itself. And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living thing on Earth.
No plant, fungus or bacterium can sit an IQ test. But to be honest, neither could you if the test was administered in a culture radically different from your own. “I would probably soundly fail an intelligence test devised by an 18th-century Sioux,” the social scientist Richard Nisbett once told me. IQ tests are culturally bound, meaning that they test the ability to represent the particular world an individual inhabits and manipulate that representation in a way that maximizes the ability to thrive in it.
What would we find if we could design a test appropriate for the culture plants inhabit?
[…]
Electrophysiological readings, for example, have for a long time revealed striking similarities in the activity of humans, plants, fungi, bacteria and other organisms. It’s uncontroversially accepted that electrical signals coordinate the physical and mental activities of brain cells. We have operationalized this knowledge. When we want to peer into the mental states produced by a human brain’s 86 billion or so neurons, we eavesdrop on their cell-to-cell electrical communication (called action potentials). We have been measuring electrical activity in the brain since the electroencephalogram was invented in 1924. Analyzing the synchronized waves produced by billions of electrical firings has allowed us to deduce whether a person is asleep, dreaming or, when awake, concentrating or unfocused.
[…]
“The reality is that all intelligence is collective intelligence,” [developmental biologist Michael] Levin told me. “It’s just a matter of scale.” Human intelligence, animal swarms, bacterial biofilms — even the cells that work in concert to compose the human anatomy. “Each of us consists of a huge number of cells working together to generate a coherent cognitive being with goals, preferences and memories that belong to the whole and not to its parts.”
[…]
“We are not even individuals at all,” wrote the technologist and artist James Bridle in “Ways of Being,” a 2022 study of multiple intelligences. “Rather we are walking assemblages, riotous communities, multi-species multi-bodied beings inside and outside of our very cells.”
Bridle was referring to (among other things) the literal pounds of every human body that consists not of human cells but bacteria and fungi and other organisms, all of which play a profound role in shaping our so-called “human” intelligence.
[…]
If we can let go of the idea that the only locus of intelligence is the human brain, then we can start to conceive of ways intelligence manifests elsewhere in biology. Call it biological cognition or biological intelligence — it seems to manifest in the relationships between individuals more than in individuals themselves. […]
“The boundaries between humans and nature and humans and machines are at the very least in suspense,” wrote the philosopher Tobias Rees. Moving away from human exceptionalism, he argued, would help “to transform politics from something that is only concerned with human affairs to something that is truly planetary,” ushering in a shift from the age of the human to ‘the age of planetary reason.’”
Source: NOEMA
Image: Landon Parenteau
I was listening on the radio to someone who was talking about AI. At first, I was skeptical of what they were saying, as it seemed to be the classic hand-waving of “machines will never be able to replace humans” without being specific. However, they did provide more specificity, mentioning how quickly we can tell, for example, if someone’s tone of voice is “I’m not really OK but I’m pretending to be.”
We spot when something isn’t right. Which is why it’s interesting to me that, while I got 10/10 on my first go on a deepfake quiz, that’s very much an outlier. I’m obviously not saying that I have some magical ability to spot what others can’t, but spending time with technologies and understanding how they work and what they look like is part of AI Literacies.
All of this reminds me of the 30,000 World War 2 volunteers who helped with the Battle of Britain by learning to spot the difference between, for example, a Messerschmitt Bf 109 and a Spitfire by listening to sound recordings, looking at silhouettes, etc.
Deepfakes have become alarmingly difficult to detect. So difficult, that only 0.1% of people today can identify them.
That’s according to iProov, a British biometric authentication firm. The company tested the public’s AI detective skills by showing 2,000 UK and US consumers a collection of both genuine and synthetic content.
[…]
Last year, a deepfake attack happened every five minutes, according to ID verification firm Onfido.
The content is frequently weaponised for fraud. A recent study estimated that AI drives almost half (43%) of all fraud attempts.
Andrew Bud, the founder and CEO of iProov, attributes the escalation to three converging trends:
The rapid evolution of AI and its ability to produce realistic deepfakes
The growth of Crime-as-a-Service (CaaS) networks that offer cheaper access to sophisticated, purpose-built, attack technologies
The vulnerability of traditional ID verification practices
Bud also pointed to the lower barriers of entry to deepfakes. Attackers have progressed from simple “cheapfakes” to powerful tools that create convincing synthetic media within minutes.
Source: The Next Web
Image: Markus Spiske
The situation in the US is a slide into authoritarianism. That much is plain to see. Some people are wary of using the label ‘fascist’ perhaps because their only mental model of what’s going on is a hazy understanding of events from the 1930s in Nazi Germany.
However, there have been many authoritarian regimes that have done unspeakable harm to their people, including mass murder of populations. It starts with language, and ends with concentration camps (invented by the Spanish in Cuba, by the way). This article in Gizmodo includes a list of banned words that will get your National Science Foundation (NSF) grant funding application rejected.
For those looking for precedents of authoritarian regimes beginning their censorship efforts by targeting language immediately upon gaining power, you might want to check out this page I created with Perplexity which summarises some examples. It also gives references for further reading.
According to the Washington Post, a word like “women” appearing will get the content flagged, but it will need to be manually reviewed to determine if the context of the word is related to a forbidden topic under the anti-DEI order. Trump and his fellow fascists use terms like DEI to describe anything they don’t like, which means that the word “women” is on the forbidden list while “men” doesn’t initiate a review.
Straight white men are seen through the MAGA worldview as the default human and thus wouldn’t be suspicious and in need of a review. Any other type of identity is inherently suspect.
Some of the terms that are getting flagged are particularly eyebrow-raising in light of the Nazi salutes that Trump supporters have been giving since he took office. For example, the term “hate speech” will get a paper at NSF flagged for further review. Redefining terms like “hate speech” is obviously part of the fascist project.
Source: Gizmodo
Image: List of banned words for NSF grants shared by Ashenafi Shumey Cherkos
As promised, I’ve returned to e-flux with an essay from Charles Tonderai Mudede, a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, college lecturer, and writer. In it, he discusses the origins of capitalism, arguing that many have missed the point: capitalism is focused on luxury goods and their consumption, and therefore can never reach a steady state, an equilibrium where everyone’s needs are met.
It’s a long-ish read, and makes some fascinating digressions (I love the story about the tulip bulb misidentified as an onion) but what I’ve quoted below is, I think, the main points being made.
Indeed, the key to capitalist products is not their use value but their uselessness, which is why so many goods driving capitalist growth were (and are) luxuries: coffee, tea, tobacco, beef, china, spices, chocolate, single-family homes, and ultimately automobiles—which define capitalism in its American moment. It’s no accident that the richest man of our times is a car manufacturer.
[…]
Capitalism has never been about use value at all, a misreading that entered the heart of Marxism through Adam Smith’s influence on Marx’s political economy. The Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville’s economics, on the other hand, represents a reading of capitalism that corresponds with what I call its configuration space, in which the defining consumer products are culturally actualized compossibilities—and predetermined, like luxuries associated with vice. The reason is simple: capitalism would simply die if it met all of our needs, and our needs are not that hard to fill.
This is precisely where John Maynard Keynes made a major mistake in his remarkable and entertaining 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” He assumed that capitalism’s noble project was to alleviate its own scarcity, its own uneven distribution of capital. Yes, he really thought that the objective of capitalism was capitalism’s own death. And indeed, the late nineteenth-century neoclassical economists universally believed this to be the case. They told the poor to leave capital accumulation to the specialists, as it alone could eventually eliminate all wants and satisfy all needs. It’s just a question of time. It is time that justified the concentration of capital in a few hands, the hands of those who had it and did not blow it. And this fortitude, which the poor lacked, deserved a reward. The people provided labor, which deserved a wage; the rich provided waiting, which deserved a profit. […]
What was missing in Keynes’s utopia? Even with little distinction from socialism, what was missing was the basic understanding that capitalism is not about producing the necessities of life, but about using every opportunity to transfer luxuries from the elites to the masses. This is the point of Boots Riley’s masterpiece Sorry to Bother You (2018), a film that may be called surreal by those who have no idea of the kind of culture they are in. The real is precisely the enchantment, the dream. Capitalism’s poor do not live in the woods but instead, like Sorry to Bother You’s main character, Cassius “Cash” Green (played by LaKeith Stanfield), drive beat-up or heavily indebted cars; work, in the words of the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, “bullshit jobs”; and sleep in vehicles made for recreation (RVs) or tents made for quick weekend breaks from urban stress, or for the lucky ones, in garages (houses for cars). This is what poverty actually looks like in a society that’s devoted to luxuries rather than necessities.
[…]
Capitalism is not, at the end of the day, based on the production of things we really need (absolute needs), for if it was, it would have already become a thing of the past. Or, in the language of thermodynamics, it would have reached equilibrium. (Indeed, the nineteenth-century British political economist John Stuart Mill called this equilibrium “a stationary state.”)
[…]
For example, an apparent shortage of housing—an absolute need or demand, meaning every human needs to be housed—could easily be solved. But what do you find everywhere in a very rich city like Seattle? No developments that come close to satisfying widespread demand for housing as an absolute need. This fact should sound an alarm in your head. We are in a system geared for relative needs. And capital’s re-enchantment is so complete that it’s hard to find a theorist who has attempted to adequately (or systemically) recognize it as such. This kind of political economy (or even anti-political economy) would find its reflection in lucid dreaming. Revolution, then, is not the end of enchantment (“the desert of the real”) but can only be re-enchantment. We are all made of dreams.
Source: e-flux
Image: Max Böhme
I find this report (PDF) by Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude.ai, really interesting. First, I have to note that they’ve purposely used a report style that looks like it’s been published in an academic journal. But, of course, it hasn’t, which means it’s not peer-reviewed. I’m not saying this invalidates the findings in anyway, especially as they’ve open-sourced the dataset used for the analysis.
Second, although they’ve mapped occupational categories, as the Anthropic researchers point out, “the occupational classification of a conversation does not necessarily mean the user was a professional in that field.” I’ve asked LLMs about health-related things, for example, but I am not a health professional.
Third, and maybe I’m an edge case here, but I use different LLMs for different purposes:
What I’m saying, I suppose, is that there’s an element of horses for courses with all of this. Increasingly, people will use different kinds of LLMs, sometimes without even realising it. If Anthropic looked at my use of Claude, they’d probably think I had some kind of programming or data analysis job. Which I don’t. So let’s take this with a grain of salt.
The following extract is taken from the report:
Here, we present a novel empirical framework for measuring AI usage across different tasks in the economy, drawing on privacy-preserving analysis of millions of real-world conversations on Claude.ai [Tamkin et al., 2024]. By mapping these conversations to occupational categories in the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET Database, we can identify not just current usage patterns, but also early indicators of which parts of the economy may be most affected as these technologies continue to advance.
We use this framework to make five key contributions:
1. Provide the first large-scale empirical measurement of which tasks are seeing AI use across the economy …Our analysis reveals highest use for tasks in software engineering roles (e.g., software engineers, data scientists, bioinformatics technicians), professions requiring substantial writing capabilities (e.g., technical writers, copywriters, archivists), and analytical roles (e.g., data scientists). Conversely, tasks in occupations involving physical manipulation of the environment (e.g., anesthesiologists, construction workers) currently show minimal use.
2. Quantify the depth of AI use within occupations …Only ∼ 4% of occupations exhibit AI usage for at least 75% of their tasks, suggesting the potential for deep task-level use in some roles. More broadly, ∼ 36% of occupations show usage in at least 25% of their tasks, indicating that AI has already begun to diffuse into task portfolios across a substantial portion of the workforce.
3. Measure which occupational skills are most represented in human-AI conversations ….Cognitive skills like Reading Comprehension, Writing, and Critical Thinking show high presence, while physical skills (e.g., Installation, Equipment Maintenance) and managerial skills (e.g., Negotiation) show minimal presence—reflecting clear patterns of human complementarity with current AI capabilities.
4. Analyze how wage and barrier to entry correlates with AI usage …We find that AI use peaks in the upper quartile of wages but drops off at both extremes of the wage spectrum. Most high-usage occupations clustered in the upper quartile correspond predominantly to software industry positions, while both very high-wage occupations (e.g., physicians) and low-wage positions (e.g., restaurant workers) demonstrate relatively low usage. This pattern likely reflects either limitations in current AI capabilities, the inherent physical manipulation requirements of these roles, or both. Similar patterns emerge for barriers to entry, with peak usage in occupations requiring considerable preparation (e.g., bachelor’s degree) rather than minimal or extensive training.
5. Assess whether people use Claude to automate or augment tasks …We find that 57% of interactions show augmentative patterns (e.g., back-and-forth iteration on a task) while 43% demonstrate automation-focused usage (e.g., performing the task directly). While this ratio varies across occupations, most occupations exhibited a mix of automation and augmentation across tasks, suggesting AI serves as both an efficiency tool and collaborative partner.
Source: The Anthropic Economic Index
Image: (taken from the report)
In his most recent newsletter, Warren Ellis shares his belief that the ideal length of an email is “10 to 75 words.” He compares this with telegrams and postcards, using these as a creative constraint for what he calls ‘flash fictions’.
The average number of words on a postcard was between forty and fifty. The average number of words in a telegram was around fourteen. Last year, I started playing with flash fictions again for the first time in more than a decade. Here’s some.
[…]
The first ever time someone takes your hand, and the first thought you have is “this is everything” and the second is “what happens when it’s gone?” The space of time between those thoughts defines the shape of your life.
[…]
Flat gray post-funeral day, feeling like a human shovel as you dig into your mother’s hoarded life-debris. At the bottom of the midden of corner-shop crap, the book of her crimes. And you recognise your father’s chest tattoo covering its scabbed boards.
[…]
That point at the end of winter when your bones feel damp.
[…]
From my perspective, houses are roomy coffins with plumbing.
Source: Orbital Operations
Image: Jenny Scott
I’ve come across lots of different licenses in my time. Some, such as Creative Commons licenses, for example, are meant to stand up in court. Others are more of a form of artistic expression, a way of signalling to an in-group, and a ‘hands-off’ warning for those therefore considered ‘out-group’.
My Spanish is still terrible, so I used DeepL to make the translation of this ‘Non-Capitalist’ clause on the En Defensa del Software Libre website, which is used in addition to the standard Attribution and Share-Alike clauses.
Non-Capitalist - Commercial exploitation of this work is only permitted to cooperatives, non-profit organisations and collectives, self-managed workers' organisations, and where no exploitative relationships exist. Any surplus or surplus value obtained from the exercise of the rights granted by this Licence on the Work must be distributed by and among the workers.
Original Spanish:
No Capitalista - La explotación comercial de esta obra sólo está permitida a cooperativas, organizaciones y colectivos sin fines de lucro, a organizaciones de trabajadores autogestionados, y donde no existan relaciones de explotación. Todo excedente o plusvalía obtenidos por el ejercicio de los derechos concedidos por esta Licencia sobre la Obra deben ser distribuidos por y entre los trabajadores.
Source: En Defensa del Software Libre
I haven’t yet listened to the episode of Neil Selwyn’s podcast entitled ‘What is ‘critical’ in critical studies of edtech? but I couldn’t resist reading the editorial written by Felicitas Macgilchrist in the open-access journal Learning, Technology and Society.
Macgilchrist argues that we shouldn’t take the word ‘critical’ for granted, and outlines three ways in which it can be considered. I particularly like her approach to critique of moving the conversation forward by “raising questions and troubling… previously held assumptions and convictions.”
Given what’s happening in the US at the moment, I’ve pulled out the Foucault quotation as making it difficult to be governed is absolutely how to resist authoritarianism — in any area of life.
When Latour (2004) wondered if critique had ‘run out of steam’, this led to a flurry of responses about critical scholarship today. If, he wrote, his neighbours now thoroughly debunk ‘facts’ as constructed, positioned and political, then what is his role as a critical scholar? Latour proposes in response that ‘the critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles’ (2004, 246). And, in this sense, ‘assembling’ joined proposals to see critical scholarship as ‘reparative’, rather than paranoid or suspicious (Sedgwick 1997), as ‘diffraction’, creating difference patterns that make a difference (Haraway 1997, 268) or as ‘worlding’, a post-colonial critical practice of creation (Wilson 2007, 210). These generative approaches have been picked up in research on learning, media and technology, for instance, analysing open knowledge practices (Stewart 2015) or equitable data practices (Macgilchrist 2019), and most explicitly in feminist perspectives on edtech (Eynon 2018; Henry, Oliver, and Winters 2019). […]
Generative forms of critique invite us to imagine other futures, and have inspired a range of speculative work on possible futures. Futurity becomes, in these studies, less about predicting the future or joining accelerationist or transhumanist futurisms, but about estranging readers from common-sense. SF ‘isn’t about the future’ (Le Guin [1976] 2019, xxi), it’s about the present, generating ‘a shocked renewal of our vision such that once again, and as though for the first time, we are able to perceive [our contemporary cultures’ and institutions’] historicity and their arbitrariness’ (Jameson 2005, 255). […]
If critique is not fault-finding or suspicion but, as one often cited source has it, the ‘art of not being governed like that and at that cost’ (Foucault 1997, 29; Butler 2001), then the critical work outlined here aims to identify how we are currently being governed, to question how this produces the acceptable or desirable horizons of ‘good education’, ‘good teaching’ or ‘good citizens’, and to speculate on alternatives.
Source: Learning, Media and Technology
Image: Marija Zaric
Just a quick reminder that you can become a supporter of Thought Shrapnel by clicking here. Thank you to The Other Doug and ARTiFactor for their one-off tips last week!
As a fully paid-up member of the Audrey Watters fan club, I make no apologies for including another one of her articles in Thought Shrapnel this week. This one has much that I could dwell on, but I’m trying not to post too much about the current digital overthrow of democracy in the US at the moment.
One could also say that I could stop posting as much about AI, but then that’s all my information feeds are full of at the moment. And, anyway, it’s an interesting topic.
While you should absolutely go and read the full text, I pulled the following out of Audrey’s post, which references something that I’ve also referenced Venkatesh Rao discuss: being above or below the “API line”. These days, it’s more like an “AI line”
In 2015, an essay made the rounds (in my household at least) that argued that jobs could be classified as above or below the “API line” – above the API, you wield control, programmatically; below, however, your job is under threat of automation, your livelihood increasingly precarious. Today, a decade later, I think we’d frame this line as an “AI” not an “API line” (much to Kin’s chagrin). We’re all told – and not just programmers – that we have to cede control to AI (to “agents” and “chatbots”) in order to have any chance to stay above it. The promise isn’t that our work will be less precarious, of course; there’s been no substantive, structural shift in power, and if anything, precarity has gotten worse. AI usage is merely a psychological cushion – we’ll feel better if we can feel faster and more efficient; we’ll feel better if we can think less.
We’re all below the AI line except for a very very very small group of wealthy white men. And they truly fucking hate us.
It’s a line, it’s always a line with them: those above, and those below. “AI is an excuse that allows those with power to operate at a distance from those whom their power touches,” writes Eryk Salvaggio in “A Fork in the Road.” Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, has always been a technology of ranking and sorting and discriminating. It has always been a technology of eugenics.
Source: Second Breakfast
Image: CC-BY Jamillah Knowles & We and AI / Better Images of AI / People and Ivory Tower AI
You should, as they say, “follow the money” when people make pronouncements. And when they’re confusing, grand-sounding, and vague, full of big words that point to a radically different future, I’d argue that you should be wary. I’ve re-read this interview with Tobias Rees several times, and I’ve concluded that what he’s saying is… bollocks.
Rees is a “founder of… an R&D studio located at the intersection of philosophy, art and technology” while also being “a senior fellow of Schmidt Sciences’ AI2050 initiative and a senior visiting fellow at Google.” Oh, and he’s a former editor of NOEMA, where this interview is published. While some of what he says sounds relatively believable, I just can’t get over this statement:
What makes AI such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — that have defined the modern period and that most humans still mostly live by. It literally renders them insufficient, thereby marking a deep caesura.
The idea that AI is a “profound philosophical event” should start your eyes rolling, and I’d be surprised if they haven’t rolled out of your head by the time you finish the next bit:
The human-machine distinction provided modern humans with a scaffold for how to understand themselves and the world around them. The philosophical significance of AIs — of built, technical systems that are intelligent — is that they break this scaffold.
That that means is that an epoch that was stable for almost 400 years comes — or appears to come — to an end.
Poetically put, it is a bit as if AI releases ourselves and the world from the understanding of ourselves and the world we had. It leaves us in the open.
In general, when people start arbitrarily dividing history into epochs (think “second industrial revolution,” etc.) they usually don’t know what they’re talking about. Rees manages to mention a bunch of philosophers (Karl Jaspers, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, etc.) but it’s a scatter-gun approach. Again, I don’t really think he knows what he’s talking about:
The alternative to being against AI is to enter AI and try to show what it could be. We need more in-between people. If my suggestion that AI is an epochal rupture is only modestly accurate, then I don’t really see what the alternative is.
What does this mean? And then, table-flipping time:
As we have elaborated in this conversation, we live in philosophically discontinuous times. The world has been outgrowing the concepts we have lived by for some time now.
We only live in “philosophically discontinuous times” if you haven’t been paying attention, and haven’t done your homework. Another reason to avoid techbro-adjacent philosophising. It’s just a waste of time.
Source: NOEMA magazine
Image: CC-BYAnne Fehres and Luke Conroy & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Data is a Mirror of Us /
I’d highly recommend listening to Helen Beetham’s latest podcast where she’s in conversation with Audrey Watters talking about AI. As you would expect, they eloquently critique AI as a tool of political and economic power, reinforcing right-wing authoritarianism, labour control, and racial hierarchies. However, the episode covers AI’s deep ties to military surveillance, eugenics, and Silicon Valley libertarianism, with them both arguing that it serves corporate and state interests rather than public good.
The second half of the podcast episode was my favourite, where they highlight how AI in education standardises learning, erases diversity (“the bell curve of banality”), and reinforces existing biases, particularly privileging male whiteness. The myth of AI as a ‘neutral’ or ‘liberating force’ is well and truly skwered, with them instead positioning ‘Luddism’ as a form of resistance against its exploitative tendencies.
I’ve pulled out one particular exchange from the episode which comes after Helen mentions Sam Altman’s response to DeepSeek r1 — something that has been likened to a ‘Sputnik moment’. The insight I appreciate is the comparison to crypto, which Audrey says was “almost too literal” in terms of being “too obvious of a con”.
Helen Beetham: OK. So, well, it’s kind of predictable, but I think the underlying message is really interesting. So effectively what he says is great. That’s great. They’re going to challenge us to do this at smaller scale. But we still need the build out. We absolutely need every inch of data centre we can have, and we need every piece of compute we can have because we’re going to need a lot of AI. And I think this is the moment where the mask starts to slip, you know, because it’s been clear for over a year that they’re not interested in a viable product. They don’t care whether the use cases work or not. Not except kind of rhetorically and incidentally. They don’t care if it’s valuable. They don’t care what it fucks up. They care about controlling data and compute. And it’s a great much better than crypto was. It seems to be much more effective than crypto at amassing that intentionality, that state will, that capital in one place to build out the biggest possible amount of data centres that are under the control of these corporations in alliance with these militarised states. And then at the same time, to control massive amounts of amounts of data and that is the underlying project. I feel that that mask is kind of coming off in all sorts of ways now. I could say something about how that plays out in the UK, but I’d really like to hear what you think.
Audrey Watters: Well, I think it’s interesting that the crypto stuff was almost too literal, right? Because this was about the creation of money. Like, literally we’re going to make up a new currency, and wrest power away from the traditional arbiters of money, the government. So it was almost like too nakedly literal. But with the generative AI, now we’re just making up, you know, students' essays. We’re just creating videos, and somehow it seems like a less overt power grab. I mean, I think for obviously for people in education, for people who work in creative industries, it’s an obvious power grab, but I think that it’s almost as though the cryptocurrency was too much of a con. It was too obvious of a con.
Source: imperfect offerings podcast
Image: Better Images of AI
I usually find abstracts on academic papers a bit rubbish, but this ‘summary’ at the top of a research study is aces. As many people in the UK will have seen in the news over the last week, a study has shown that there’s “no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. As a result, “the findings do not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form.”
This, of course, does not chime with what the public (parents, politicians, etc.) want to hear, so I imagine it will be widely ignored. In fact, when this was reported on in a radio news bulletin I heard, they immediately cut to a soundbite from a headteacher who had implemented a “no phones” policy who basically said it had worked for them. There are many problems with smartphone uses by teenagers in schools. But then there are many problems with schools.
Background: Poor mental health in adolescents can negatively affect sleep, physical activity and academic performance, and is attributed by some to increasing mobile phone use. Many countries have introduced policies to restrict phone use in schools to improve health and educational outcomes. The SMART Schools study evaluated the impact of school phone policies by comparing outcomes in adolescents who attended schools that restrict and permit phone use.
Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional observational study with adolescents from 30 English secondary schools, comprising 20 with restrictive (recreational phone use is not permitted) and 10 with permissive (recreational phone use is permitted) policies. The primary outcome was mental wellbeing (assessed using Warwick– Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale [WEMWBS]). Secondary outcomes included smartphone and social media time. Mixed effects linear regression models were used to explore associations between school phone policy and participant outcomes, and between phone and social media use time and participant outcomes. Study registration: ISRCTN77948572.
Findings: We recruited 1227 participants (age 12–15) across 30 schools. Mean WEMWBS score was 47 (SD = 9) with no evidence of a difference between groups (adjusted mean difference −0.48, 95% CI −2.05 to 1.06, p = 0.62). Adolescents attending schools with restrictive, compared to permissive policies had lower phone (adjusted mean difference −0.67 h, 95% CI −0.92 to −0.43, p = 0.00024) and social media time (adjusted mean difference −0.54 h, 95% CI −0.74 to −0.36, p = 0.00018) during school time, but there was no evidence for differences when comparing usage time on weekdays or weekends.
Interpretation: There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. The findings do not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, and indicate that these policies require further development.
Source: The Lancet
Image: True Images/Alamy (via The Guardian)
As a technologist and educator (former History teacher!) who wrote his doctoral thesis on digital literacies, this article couldn’t be any more in my sweet spot if it tried. Dr Gordon McKelvie talks about his British Academy project about misinformatoin, focusing on queens “because they were prominent enough figures to be spoken about and blamed for the country’s ills.”
Although only coined in 2013, Brandolini’s law has always been in full effect: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." At least we live in a time when things can, in theory, be rebutted and debunked quickly. Back in medieval times, people would believe misinformation for years — if not their entire lives.
While a focus on the immediate problems confronting democratic states dealing with the spread of conspiracy theories is essential, we should not lose sight of the fact that misinformation was around long before the internet. If we look back into the distant past, we see the spread of conspiracy theories have been a common feature throughout human history. Technology is a means of spreading misinformation, not the cause of misinformation. […]
A key finding has been that fake news often becomes accepted historical fact. An example that illustrates this is the death of Anne Neville, wife of the infamous Richard III. We do not know the exact cause of her death, but it was probably natural causes. One contemporary source, however, claimed that the king needed to deny poisoning her in order to marry his niece. This is the only near-contemporary reference to such an event, written by the hostile Crowland chronicler . By the time Shakespeare was writing his ‘The Tragedy of Richard III’ a century later, this had become an accepted historical fact. Here, we see something that began as a piece of misinformation in the fifteenth century transformed into an accepted historical fact in the sixteenth century. […]
When we look elsewhere in medieval Europe, we see other examples of misinformation premised on existing prejudices. During the First Crusade, mistrust between the Catholic crusaders and the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire led to conspiracy theories that the Byzantines were colluding with Muslims against their fellow Christians. When the first wave of the Black Death hit Europe in 1348, Jews were thought to have spread the disease by poisoning wells, simply to kill Christians. In both examples, pre-existing beliefs and fears meant that misinformation and conspiracy theories flourished quickly. […]
Misinformation was a key feature of medieval politics and society. Examining the spread of fake news, or conspiracy theories, in the centuries before even the printing press, never mind the internet, helps us understand how they flourish and their appeal. […]
Historians have an important part to play in fleshing out our understanding of misinformation. We are indeed living in an age of mistrust, but certainly not the first, and almost definitely not the last.
Source: The British Academy
Image: Walters Art Museum
I’ve held off posting anything about what’s currently going on in the USA at the moment, as apparently it’s all very confusing even if you’re paying full attention. What did make me sit up and take notice, though, was Jason Kottke’s use of screengrab from Mad Max: Fury Road when summarising a Bluesky thread by Abe Newman about Elon Musk’s seizure of key parts of the government’s information systems.
For those who haven’t seen the film (one of my favourites, especially the Black & Chrome Edition), it’s the perfect analogy. A character by the name of Immortan Joe, a dictator in a post-apocalyptic landscape, who is revered as a god by his followers. He dominates the economy by controlling the only supply of fresh water, which he turns on from time to time, saying “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!" I’ve included a gif above that shows the moment from the film.
Newman links to reporting that detail that these operations are controlled by Musk: payment, personnel, and operations. But seeing them as part of a bigger strategy is important:
The first point is to make the connection. Reporting has seen these as independent ‘lock outs’ or access to specific IT systems. This seems much more a part of a coherent strategy to identify centralized information systems and control them from the top.
Newman continues:
So what are the risks. First, the panopticon. Made popular by Foucault, the idea is that if you let people know that they are being watched from a central position they are more likely to obey. E.g. emails demanding changes or workers will be added to lists…
The second is the chokepoint. If you have access to payments and data, you can shut opponents off from key resources. Sen Wyden sees this coming.
Divert to loyalists. Once you have a 360 view, you can redirect resources to insiders and cut off the opposition.
Source: Kottke.org
Along with about six different supplements, I add creatine to my protein smoothies every day I do exercise. Which, to be fair, is most days ending in a ‘y’. Too much of the white powder and I get angry but, as a male vegetarian, it’s important that I get some in my diet.
It turns out that creatine isn’t just good for building and maintaining muscle mass, though. It turns out that it’s also good for mental health, too — and combining it with various forms of therapy is especially beneficial.
More recently, researchers have begun to look at the broader systemic effects of creatine supplementation. Of particular interest has been the relationship between creatine and brain health. Following the discovery of endogenous creatine synthesis in the human brain, research quickly moved to understand what role this compound plays in things like cognition and mood.
Most studies linking brain benefits to creatine supplementation are either small or preliminary but there are enough clues to suggest that something positive could be going on here. For example, one oft-cited clinical trial from 2012 found creatine supplementation can effectively augment anti-depressant treatment. The trial was small (just 52 subjects, all women) but after eight weeks it found those subjects taking creatine supplements with their SSRI antidepressant were twice as likely to achieve remission from depression symptoms compared to those just taking antidepressants.
A recent article reviewing the research on creatine supplementation and depression pointed to several physiological mechanisms that could plausibly explain how this compound could improve mental health. Alongside citing several small trials that found positive results from creatine supplementation, the article concludes by stating: “Creatine is a naturally occurring organic acid that serves as an energy buffer and energy shuttle in tissues, such as brain and skeletal muscle, that exhibit dynamic energy requirements. Evidence, deriving from a variety of scientific domains, that brain bioenergetics are altered in depression and related disorders is growing. Clinical studies in neurological conditions such as PD [Parkinson’s Disease] have indicated that creatine might have an antidepressant effect, and early clinical studies in depressive disorders – especially MDD [Major Depressive Disorder] – indicate that creatine may have an important antidepressant effect.”
Source: New Atlas
Image: HowToGym
It’s hard not to agree with John Gruber’s analysis of Openvibe, an app that allows you to mash together all of the different decentralised social networks (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc.) into one timeline. He doesn’t like it, and I have never liked the idea.
That’s partly because it’s confusing, but even if you managed to provide a compelling UX, the rhetorics of interactive communication are completely different on social networks. The way people interact on one social network use different norms and approaches than others. That means different literacies are involved. I’d argue that mashing it all together only really serves people who wish to ‘broadcast’ messages to multiple places at the same time.
I really don’t see the point of mashing the tweets from two (or more!) different social networks into one unified timeline. To me it’s just confusing. I don’t love the current situation where three entirely separate, thriving social networks are worth some portion of my attention (not to mention that a fourth, X, still kinda does too). But when I use each of these platforms, I want to use a client that is dedicated to each platform. These platforms all have different features, to varying degrees, and they definitely have different vibes and cultural norms. Pretending that they all form one big (lowercase-m) meta platform doesn’t make that pretense cohesive. Mashing them all together in one timeline isn’t simpler. It sounds simpler but in practice it’s more cacophonous.
The idea that this might in any way appeal to “newcomers” is bananas to me. The concept of streaming multiple accounts from multiple networks into one timeline is by definition a bit advanced. In my experience, for very obvious reasons, casual social network users only use the first-party client. They’re confused even by the idea of using, say, an app named Ivory to access a social network called Mastodon. The idea of explaining to them why they might want to use an app named Openvibe to access Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads (and the weirdo blockchain network Nostr) is like trying to explain to your dog why they should stay out of the trash. There’s a market for third-party clients (or at least I hope there is), but that market is not made up of “newcomers”.
Source: Daring Fireball
I’ve been following the development of Are.na since the early days of leading the MoodleNet project. It’s a great example of a platform that serves a particular niche of users (“connected knowledge collectors”) really well.
In this Are.na editorial, Elan Ullendorff — a designer, writer, and educator — talks about the course he teaches. In it, he helps students research and map algorithms, before writing their own, and releasing them to the world.
I write a newsletter, teach a course, and run workshops all called “escape the algorithm.” The implicit joke of the name’s particularity (not “escape algorithms” but “escape the algorithm”) is that living outside of algorithms isn’t actually possible. An algorithm is simply a set of instructions that determines a specific result. The recommendation engine that causes Spotify to encourage you to listen to certain music is a cultural sieve, but so were, in a way, the Billboard charts and radio gatekeepers that preceded it. There have always been centers of power, always been forces that exert gravitational pulls on our behavior.
The anxiety isn’t determined by the presence or absence of code. It comes from a lack of transparency and control. You are susceptible whether or not TikTok exists, whether or not you delete it. Logging off is one tool, but it will not alone cure you.
Instead of withdrawing, I encourage my students to dive deeper, engaging with platforms as if they were close reading a work of literature. In doing so, I believe that we can not only better understand a platform’s ideological premises, but also the inevitable cracks in a rigid software logic that enables the surprising, delightful messiness of humanity to shine through. And in so doing, we might move beyond the flight response towards a fight response. Or if it is a flight response, let it be a flight not just away from something, but towards something.
[…]
Resisting the paths most traveled invites us to look at the platforms we use with a critical eye, leading us to new forms of critique, making visible parts of the world and culture that are out of our view, and inspiring entirely new ways of navigating the web.
Take Andrew Norman Wilson’s ScanOps, a collection of Google Books screenshots that include the hands of low-paid Google data entry workers, or Chia Amisola’s The Sound of Love, which curates evocative comments on Youtube songs. Then there’s Riley Walz’s Bop Spotter (a commentary on ShotSpotter, gunshot detection microphones often licensed by city governments), a constantly Shazam-ing Android phone hidden on a pole in the Mission district.
Source: Are.na
Image: Андрей Сизов
Hi everyone, Doug here. Just to let you know that it’s now possible to support Thought Shrapnel on a monthly basis!
Don’t worry, nothing’s changing other than your ability to ensure the sustainability of this publication, receive a holographic sticker to go on your water bottle (or whatever), and have your name listed as a supporter.
We used to have around 60 supporters of Thought Shrapnel back in the day, so I hope you’ll consider becoming one of the first to get this new (rare!) holographic sticker. This is part of a little February experimentation…
My daughter was complaining that, now she’s in high school, her English teacher demands more of her writing. I happened to have just read a post at Futility Closet about the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald which gives examples of him coming up with vividly atmospheric descriptions of scenes. I shared it with her, so hopefully she’ll use it as inspiration.
While I’m not a fan of overly-long descriptions just for the sake of it, this writing is sublime. It makes me want to re-read The Great Gatsby.
In the light of four strong pocket flash lights, borne by four sailors in spotless white, a gentleman was shaving himself, standing clad only in athletic underwear upon the sand. Before his eyes an irreproachable valet held a silver mirror which gave back the soapy reflection of his face. To right and left stood two additional menservants, one with a dinner coat and trousers hanging from his arm and the other bearing a white stiff shirt whose studs glistened in the glow of the electric lamps. There was not a sound except the dull scrape of the razor along its wielder’s face and the intermittent groaning sound that blew in out of the sea.
Source: The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Image: Illia Plakhuta
More articles about games should be games themselves, in my opinion! I loved this, and there’s a write-up of how and why it was created at here.
I spend enough times on screens, so haven’t really got into the ‘cozy’ genre, but I know that it’s a huge thing. Games that you can play on your own terms, provide a bit of escapism, are (as the article describes) proven to be as good as meditation and other forms of deep relaxation.
The gaming industry is larger than the film and music industries combined globally. A growing sector is the subgenre dubbed “cozy games.” They are marked by their relaxing nature, meant to help players unwind with challenges that are typically more constructive than destructive. Recent research explores whether this style of game, along with video games more generally, can improve mental health and quality of life.
These play-at-your-own-pace games attract both longtime gamers and newcomers. […]
There’s no hard definition for a “cozy game.” If the game gives the player a cozy, warm feeling then it fits.
[…]
These games can provide a space for people to connect in ways they may not in the real world. Suzanne Roman, who describes herself as an autistic advocate, said gaming communities can be lifelines for neurodivergent people, including her own autistic daughter who celebrated her 18th birthday in lockdown. “I think it’s just made them more confident people, who feel like they fit in socially. There’s even been relationships, of course, that have formed in the real world out of this.”
Source: Reuters
Yesterday, after a conversation on the #ai channel in WAO’s Slack, I published Ways of categorising ethical concerns relating to generative AI. There was some pushback on Mastodon.
Alan Levine asked if I knew of any LLMs which say they’re trained on “open data” and where you can actually see the sources. It’s a good point, and I do know of one, which is Public Domain 12M (or PD12M for short). LLMs are a class of technologies, so (as I was trying to get at in my original post) we should be clear and specific in our objections to them.
Although I don’t share the concern, I understand the position which could be broadly stated as: “I have a problem with LLM datasets being scraped from the open web without the explicit consent of copyright holders.” But that’s not a position against LLMs per se. It’s an objection based on the copyright status of the ingested data.
At 12.4 million image-caption pairs, PD12M is the largest public domain image-text dataset to date, with sufficient size to train foundation models while minimizing copyright concerns. Through the Source.Plus platform, we also introduce novel, community-driven dataset governance mechanisms that reduce harm and support reproducibility over time.
Source: Source.Plus
Matt Webb is, like me, over 40 years of age. Although some would argue differently, it’s a time when you realise that your fastest days are behind you. So apps like Strava reminding you that you’re not quite as fast as you were a few years ago isn’t… particularly helpful.
There’s definitely a gap in the market for fitness apps for people who are no longer spring chickens and, although they like to challenge themselves occasionally, aren’t trying to smash it every time they go out for a run, cycle, or to the gym. I also appreciate Webb’s related point that there comes a time when reminders about things in life are just a bit painful. The opportunity not to be reminded about things would be nice.
Part of getting older is finding that my PBs each time I train up - personal bests - are not as quick as they were before. […]
I’m currently trying to increase my baseline endurance and went out for a 17 mi run a few days ago. Paused to take photos of the Thames Barrier and a rainbow, no stress. Beautiful. Felt ok when I finished – hey I made it back! Wild!
Then Strava showed me the almost identical run from exactly 5 years ago, I’d forgotten: a super steady pace, a whole minute per mile faster than this week’s tough muddle through. […]
Our quantified self apps (Strava is one) are built by people with time on their side and capacity to improve. A past achievement will almost certainly remind you of a happy day that can be visited again or, in the rear view mirror, has been joyfully surpassed. But for older people… And I’m not even that old, just past my physical peak… […]
I’m not asking Strava to hide these reminders. I’ve found peace (not as completely as I thought it turns out). But I don’t want to avoid those memories. Reminded, I do remember that time from 2020! It is a happy memory! I like to remember what I could do, even if it is slightly bittersweet! […]
And I’ll bet we’re all having that feeling a little bit, deep down, unnamed and unlocated and unconscious quite often, amplified by using these apps. So many of us are using apps that draw from the quantified self movement (Wikipedia) of the 2010s, in one way or another, and that movement was by young people. Perhaps there were considerations unaccounted for – getting older for one. There will be consequences for that, however subtle.
(Another blindspot of the under 40s: it is the most heartbreaking thing to see birthday notifications for people who are no longer with us. Please, please, surely there is a more humane way to handle this?)
So I can’t help viewing some of the present day’s fierce obsession with personal health and longevity or even brain uploads not as a healthy desire for progress but, amplified by poor design work, as an attempt to outrun death.
Source: Interconnected
Image: Tim Foster
This is an absolutely incredible interview of Alison Gopnik (AG) and Melanie Mitchell (MM). Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy and studies children’s learning and development, while Mitchell is a professor of computer science and complexity focusing on conceptual abstraction and analogy-making in AI systems.
There’s so much insight in here, so you’ll have to forgive me quoting it at length. I urge you to go and read the whole thing. The thing that really stood out for me was Gopnik’s philosophical insights based on her experience around child development. Fascinating.
AG: There is an implicit intuitive model that everyday people (including very smart people in the tech world) have about how intelligence works: there’s this mysterious substance called intelligence, and as you have more of it, you gain power and authority. But that’s just not the picture coming out of cognitive science. Rather, there’s this very wide array of different kinds of cognitive capacities, many of which trade off against each other. So being really good at one thing actually makes you worse at something else. To echo Melanie, one of the really interesting things we’re learning about LLMs is that things like grammar, which we might have thought required an independent-model-building kind of intelligence, you can get from extracting statistical patterns in data. LLMs provide a test case for asking, What can you learn just from transmission, just from extracting information from the people around you? And what requires independent exploration and being in the world?
[…]
MM: I like to tell people that everything an LLM says is actually a hallucination. Some of the hallucinations just happen to be true because of the statistics of language and the way we use language. But a big part of what makes us intelligent is our ability to reflect on our own state. We have a sense for how confident we are about our own knowledge. This has been a big problem for LLMs. They have no calibration for how confident they are about each statement they make other than some sense of how probable that statement is in terms of the statistics of language. Without some extra ability to ground what they’re saying in the world, they can’t really know if something they’re saying is true or false.
[…]
AG: Some things that seem very intuitive and emotional, like love or caring for children, are really important parts of our intelligence. Take the famous alignment problem in computer science: How do you make sure that AI has the same goals we do? Humans have had that problem since we evolved, right? We need to get a new generation of humans to have the right kinds of goals. And we know that other humans are going to be in different environments. The niche in which we evolved was a niche where everything was changing. What do you do when you know that the environment is going to change but you want to have other members of your species that are reasonably well aligned? Caregiving is one of the things that we do to make that happen. Every time we raise a new generation of children, we’re faced with this difficulty of here are these intelligences, they’re new, they’re different, they’re in a different environment, what can we do to make sure that they have the right kinds of goals? Caregiving might actually be a really powerful metaphor for thinking about our relationship with AIs as they develop. […]
Now, it’s not like we’re in the ballpark of raising AIs as if they were humans. But thinking about that possibility gives us a way of understanding what our relationship to artificial systems might be. Often the picture is that they’re either going to be our slaves or our masters, but that doesn’t seem like the right way of thinking about it. We often ask, Are they intelligent in the way we are? There’s this kind of competition between us and the AIs. But a more sensible way of thinking about AIs is as a technological complement. It’s funny because no one is perturbed by the fact that we all have little pocket calculators that can solve problems instantly. We don’t feel threatened by that. What we typically think is, With my calculator, I’m just better at math. […]
But we still have to put a lot of work into developing norms and regulations to deal with AI systems. An example I like to give is, imagine that it was 1880 and someone said, all right, we have this thing, electricity, that we know burns things down, and I think what we should do is put it in everybody’s houses. That would have seemed like a terribly dangerous idea. And it’s true—it is a really dangerous thing. And it only works because we have a very elaborate system of regulation. There’s no question that we’ve had to do that with cultural technologies as well. When print first appeared, it was open season. There was tons of misinformation and libel and problematic things that were printed. We gradually developed ideas like newspapers and editors. I think the same thing is going to be true with AI. At the moment, AI is just generating lots of text and pictures in a pretty random way. And if we’re going to be able to use it effectively, we’re going to have to develop the kinds of norms and regulations that we developed for other technologies. But saying that it’s not the robot that’s going to come and supplant us is not to say we don’t have anything to worry about. […]
Often the metaphor for an intelligent system is one that is trying to get the most power and the most resources. So if we had an intelligent AI, that’s what it would do. But from an evolutionary point of view, that’s not what happens at all. What you see among the more intelligent systems is that they’re more cooperative, they have more social bonds. That’s what comes with having a large brain: they have a longer period of childhood and more people taking care of children. Very often, a better way of thinking about what an intelligent system does is that it tries to maintain homeostasis. It tries to keep things in a stable place where it can survive, rather than trying to get as many resources as it possibly can. Even the little brine shrimp is trying to get enough food to live and avoid predators. It’s not thinking, Can I get all of the krill in the entire ocean? That model of an intelligent system doesn’t fit with what we know about how intelligent systems work.
Source: LA Review of Books
Domenico Vicinanza, Associate Professor of Intelligent Systems and Data Science at Anglia Ruskin University, explains the difference between classical computing and quantum computing. The latters uses ‘qubits’ instead of bits, so instead of just being in the binary state of 0 or 1, then can be in either or both simultaneously.
Vicinanza gives the example of optimising flight paths for the 45,000+ flights, organised by 500+ airlines, using 4,000+ airports. With classical computing, this optimisation would attempted sequentially using algorithms. It would take too long. In quantum computing, every permutation can be tried at the same time.
Quantum computing deals in probabilities rather than certainties, so classical computing isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, reading this article reminded me of using LLMs. They’re very useful, but you have to know how to use them — and you can’t necessarily take a single response at face value.
Quantum computers are incredibly powerful for solving specific problems – such as simulating the interactions between different molecules, finding the best solution from many options or dealing with encryption and decryption. However, they are not suited to every type of task.
Classical computers process one calculation at a time in a linear sequence, and they follow algorithms (sets of mathematical rules for carrying out particular computing tasks) designed for use with classical bits that are either 0 or 1. This makes them extremely predictable, robust and less prone to errors than quantum machines. For everyday computing needs such as word processing or browsing the internet, classical computers will continue to play a dominant role.
There are at least two reasons for that. The first one is practical. Building a quantum computer that can run reliable calculations is extremely difficult. The quantum world is incredibly volatile, and qubits are easily disturbed by things in their environment, such as interference from electromagnetic radiation, which makes them prone to errors.
The second reason lies in the inherent uncertainty in dealing with qubits. Because qubits are in superposition (are neither a 0 or 1) they are not as predictable as the bits used in classical computing. Physicists therefore describe qubits and their calculations in terms of probabilities. This means that the same problem, using the same quantum algorithm, run multiple times on the same quantum computer might return a different solution each time.
To address this uncertainty, quantum algorithms are typically run multiple times. The results are then analysed statistically to determine the most likely solution. This approach allows researchers to extract meaningful information from the inherently probabilistic quantum computations.
Source: The Conversation
Image: Sigmund
It’s hard to avoid the drama unfolding at the start of the second Trump presidential term. I don’t even know, really, what’s going on — other than a lot of confusion and emotional violence. I guess the cruelty is the point.
Anyway, Ryan Broderick of much-quoted Garbage Day fame, has some advice for journalists which is advice for us all, really: the world has changed, so it’s time to adapt. That doesn’t mean “sell out” or “abandon your ethics.” Quite the opposite.
Welcome to 2025. No one reads your website or watches your TV show. Subscription revenue will never truly replace ad revenue and ad revenue is never coming back. All of your influence is now determined by algorithms owned by tech oligarchs that stole your ad revenue and they not only hate you, personally, but have aligned themselves with a president that also hates you, personally. The information vacuum you created by selling yourself out for likes and shares and Facebook-funded pivot-to-video initiatives in the 2010s has been filled in by random “news influencers,” some of which are literally using ChatGPT to write their posts. While many others are just making shit up to go viral. And the people taking over the country currently have spent the last decade, in public, I might add, crafting a playbook — one you dismissed — that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America. And that includes our free and open and lazy mainstream media. And they’re pretty confident it’ll succeed because, unlike you, they know how broken the internet is now and are happy to take advantage of it. While I’m sure it feels very professional to continue playing stenographer in your little folding chair at the White House, they’re literally replacing you with podcasters as we speak. So this is it. Adapt or die. Or at the very least, die with some dignity.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: wu yi
This is more of a bookmark than a post, but I’ve only just discovered the blog of Garry Newman (who some might know from Garry’s Mod). Looking at the HTML, it doesn’t look like he’s using a particular generator (e.g. WordPress) or a theme, so he must have custom-built it.
What I love about it is the logical unfolding from the meta-level navigation on the left, through the column of densely-listed posts in the middle, to the display of the individual post on the right.
If you’re reading this and know of a similar blog theme, on any platform, could you let me know?
Source: garry.net
In his most recent Monday Memo, Dave Gray explained how he channeled Brad Diderickson by composing his newsletter verbally while walking. That conversational style and approach is interesting and engaging, and a good way to not sound ‘stilted’ when writing. Another way is to teach yourself to touch-type, so that the words that are coming out of your brain appear on the computer screen quickly.
I’m thinking about this due to a post that I saw via Hacker News where Henrik Karlsson gives some advice for a friend who wants to start a blog. There are 19 pieces of advice, and #4 is:
People tend to sound more like themselves in chat messages than in blog posts. So perhaps write in the chat, rapidly, to a friend.
And #6:
One reason chat messages are unusually lively is that the format encourages you to write from emotion. You are talking to someone you like and you want to resonate with them, you want to make them laugh. This creates a surge in the writing. It is lovely. When you write from your head, your style sinks back under the waves.
But the best bit of advice in the list is, I think, #18:
In real life, you can’t go on and on about your obsessions; you have to tame yourself to not ruin the day for others. This is a good thing. Otherwise, we’d be ripping each other’s arms off like chimpanzees. But a blog is a tiny internet house where you decide the norms. And since there are already countless places where you can’t be yourself, there is no need to build another one of those. The law of the land is that everything you think is funny is funny. Those who find the texture of your mind boring or offensive can close the tab—no need to worry about them. It is good for the soul to have a place where being just the way you are is normal. And it is a service to others, too. You’ll be surprised how many people are laughably similar to you and who wish there was a place where they felt normal. You can build that.
If you’re reading this and don’t put your words out on the internet on a regular basis, why not change that?
Source: Escaping Flatland
Image: Justin Morgan
Cory Doctorow is such an amazing writer and speaker. He explains reasonably complex things so concisely and straightforwardly. This is one such explainer, where he discusses how issues which are usually described as being to do with the ‘economy’ are actually to do with power.
This kind of reframing is really useful, especially for people who, like the proverbial fish swimming in water, haven’t really thought about what it means to live within capitalism.
The cost and price of a good or service is the tangible expression of power. It is a matter of politics, not economics. If consumer protection agencies demand that companies provide safe, well-manufactured goods, if there are prohibitions on price-fixing and profiteering, then value shifts from the corporation to its customers.
But if labor and consumer groups act in solidarity, then they can operate as a bloc and bosses and investors have to eat shit. Back in 2017, the pilots' union for American Airlines forced their bosses into a raise. Wall Street freaked out and tanked AA’s stock. Analysts for big banks were outraged. Citi’s Kevin Crissey summed up the situation perfectly, in a fuming memo: “This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers”:
Limiting the wealth of the investor class also limits their power, because money translates pretty directly into political power. This sets up a virtuous cycle: the less money the investor class has to spend on political projects, the more space there is for consumer- and labor-protection laws to be enacted and enforced. As labor and consumer law gets more stringent, the share of the national income going to people who make things, and people who use the things they make, goes up – and the share going to people who own things goes down.
Seen this way, it’s obvious that prices and wages are a political matter, not an “economic” one. Orthodox economists maintain the pretense that they practice a kind of physics of money, discovering the “natural,” “empirical” way that prices and wages move. They dress this up with mumbo-jumbo like the “efficient market hypothesis,” “price discovery,” “public choice,” and that old favorite, “trickle-down theory.” Strip away the doublespeak and it boils down to this: “Actually, your boss is right. He does deserve more of the value than you do”:
Even if you’ve been suckered by the lie that bosses have a legal “fiduciary duty” to maximize shareholder returns (this is a myth, by the way – no such law exists), it doesn’t follow that customers or workers share that fiduciary duty. As a customer, you are not legally obliged to arrange your affairs to maximize the dividends paid by to investors in your corporate landlord or by the merchants you patronize. As a worker, you are under no legal obligation to consider shareholders' interests when you bargain for wages, benefits and working conditions.
The “fiduciary duty” lie is another instance of politics masquerading as economics: even if bosses bargain for as big a slice of the pie as they can get, the size of that slice is determined by the relative power of bosses, customers and workers.
Source: Pluralistic
Image: Angèle Kamp
Marina Hyde reflects, in her inimical way, on the children’s commissioner’s report into why children became involved in last summer’s riots. Apparently, at least 147 were arrested and 84 charged, and almost all were boys. As she points out, it’s not exactly a great time to be a kid in the UK, is it?
Having been a teacher, and as a parent of two teenagers who survived the pandemic lockdowns, I can attest that the world looks pretty grim when they raise their heads from their phones and games controllers. Why would they bother? And what are we, as adults, doing about it?
Children might sometimes do very bad and stupid things, but they are not so stupid that they can’t see they live in a country where the gulf in opportunities is quite staggering. It’s droll to think that two months after the riots, we’d be listening to Keir Starmer’s blithe defence of his decision to take up the freebie loan of an £18m penthouse so his son could study for his GCSEs in peace and quiet. “Any parent would have made the same decision,” explained the prime minister. Any parent, if you please. I do wonder what on earth the parents of the rioting youngsters were doing making the choices they did. I would simply have let my teens spend the afternoon in an £18m penthouse instead. Anyway, speaking of guillotine-beckoning comments, perhaps it isn’t the most enormous surprise that the Channel 4 study found 47% of gen Z agreeing that “the entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”.
Again, it’s easy to dismiss, but if they believe these things, surely it’s on those of our generations who failed to make the status quo seem remotely appealing? Many of the behaviours of today’s teens and young adults are not simply thick / snowflakey / lazy, but rational responses to a world created by their elders, if not always betters. The childhood experience has deteriorated completely in the past 15 years or so. We have addicted children to – and depressed them with – smartphones, and done next to nothing about this no matter how much evidence of the most toxic harms mounts up. Children in the US are expected to tidy their rooms by generations who also expect them to rehearse active-shooter drills. We require young people to show gratitude for living in an iteration of capitalism in which they have not only no stake, but no obvious hope of getting a stake. It seems to them that there have been better times to be alive.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Discovered via John Naughton’s Memex 1.1, this article by Henry Farrell explains how we’re not living in an Orwellian or Huxleyian dystopia, but one that resembles the writing of Philip K. Dick.
The reason for this analysis? Dick “was interested in seeing how people react when their reality starts to break down” and, if we’re honest, we can see this happening everywhere. It’s easy to point to Trump and other political examples, but it’s everywhere. People exist in their own little bubbles, interacting with other people who may or not be real, via algorithms they do not control.
This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.
Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.
This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.
Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).
In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.
[…]
In his novels Dick was interested in seeing how people react when their reality starts to break down. A world in which the real commingles with the fake, so that no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins, is ripe for paranoia. The most toxic consequence of social media manipulation, whether by the Russian government or others, may have nothing to do with its success as propaganda. Instead, it is that it sows an existential distrust. People simply do not know what or who to believe anymore. Rumors that are spread by Twitterbots merge into other rumors about the ubiquity of Twitterbots, and whether this or that trend is being driven by malign algorithms rather than real human beings.
Source: Programmable Mutter
Image: Denys Nevozhai
I’m posting this from Andrew Curry mainly so I don’t forget the books referenced (already added to my Literal.club queue) and so that I can remember to check back on the Strother School of Radical Attention that he mentions.
Sadly, their awesome-looking courses are either in-person (US) or online at times where it’s the early hours of the morning here in the UK.
There’s something of a history now of writing about the commodification of attention as a feature of late stage capitalism. [Rhoda] Feng [writing in The American Prospect] spotlights a few. Tim Wu’s book The Attention Merchants traces this back to its origins in the late 19th century. James Williams’ Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy positions the struggle for attention as the prime moral challenge of our time. Williams had previously worked for Google. The more recent collection Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses “took a multidisciplinary approach”, exploring the interplay between attention and practices like pedagogy, Buddhist meditation, and therapy.
[…]
In her review, Feng critiques the framing here of attention as scarcity—essentially an economics version that goes back to Herbert Simon in the 1970s—he said, presciently, “that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Frankly, it is more serious than that: as James Williams says in Stand Out of Our Light,
“the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information … but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes.” The issue, one might say, is less about scarcity than sovereignty.
There are pockets of resistance which are trying to reclaim our sovereignty. Feng points to Friends of Attention, new to me, whose Manifesto calls for the emancipation of attention.
Source: Just Two Things
Image: Markus Spiske
I’ve only been made redundant once in my career, but I could see it coming, prepared for it, and jumped straight into full-time consultancy. However, my weird brain still surfaces it sometimes in the early hours of the morning when I can’t get back to sleep, along with other ‘failures’ in life. (It wasn’t a failure; I didn’t ‘fail’.)
The thing is, though, that working for any hierarchical organisation, whether it’s for-profit, non-profit, or otherwise, means that you have very little power or say in how things operate. What I liked about this article was how well it explains the difference between how you enter and how you leave an organisation.
The Stoic philosophers tell us that in life you should prepare for death. I don’t think it’s unreasonable in our working lives to also prepare for endings, and do them on our own terms.
For those like me who’ve experienced layoffs, work has become just that—work. You do what’s assigned, and if your company squanders your potential or forces you to waste time on unnecessary projects, you simply stop caring. You collect your paycheck at the end of the month, and that’s it. This is the new modern work: no more striving to be 40% better every year.
[…]
I’ve wanted to write about this topic for a long time, but it’s been difficult to find the energy. The subject itself is a deep disappointment for me, and every time I reflect on layoffs, it makes me profoundly sad. It’s a stark reminder of how companies treat workers as disposable. Before you join, they go to great lengths to make you feel valued and excited to accept their offer. You meet multiple people, and some even offer signing bonuses. But when layoffs come, you’re reduced to a name on a list. During the exit interview, a random person from the company reads a prepared script and can’t answer your questions. The HR team that once worked to make you feel valued doesn’t even conduct an actual conversation with you. That random person becomes the last connection you have to a company you spent years at.
Source: Mert Bulan
Image: Mitchell Luo
Kai Brach cites Anne Helen Petersen about cultural tipping points relating to technology use. Petersen, in turn, quotes Kate Lindsay who discusses the lack of boredom in our lives — which exhausts our brains.
In my own life I’ve found that anxiety can be absolutely paralysing, stopping me from getting done the smallest tasks. I have techniques for getting around that, some of which involve supplements, but mainly in terms of just doing stuff. That lends a kind of momentum which allows me to get things done.
However, always doing things is tiring. It takes me back to a couple of posts: Who are you without the doing? and Taking breaks to be more human.
Or perhaps, as Anne Helen Petersen suggests in her latest piece, we’ve reached a cultural tipping point:
“The amount of space these technologies take up in our lives – and their ever-diminishing utility – has brought us to a sort of cultural tipping point. [Our feeds have completed their] years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.”
The spaces we once inhabited feel increasingly alien, overtaken by algorithmic ghosts and corporate voices that leave us restless, overstimulated, yet empty and disconnected.
Petersen quotes Kate Lindsay’s writing about how boredom is missing in our lives – and it’s the perfect observation:
“Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep ‘not having time’ to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time – you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.”
Source: Dense Discovery
Image: Saketh
These days, I spread my social media attention between Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn. I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing on either of the latter two, if I’m perfectly honest.
LinkedIn is a horrible place that makes me feel bad. But it’s the only real connection I’ve got to some semblance of a ‘professional’ network. Bluesky, on the other hand, just seems like a pale imitation of what Twitter used to be. I’m spending less time there recently.
As Warren Ellis suggests in the following, if you’re going to jump ship from somewhere to somewhere else, it’s probably a good idea that you’re going to be treated well, long-term.
Seeing a lot of people in my RSS announcing they’ve deleted various social media products. Usually to announce they’re on BlueSky or Substack Notes or whatever today’s one is. I am not on any of the new ones and just left the old ones by the side of the road. Some say these accounts should be deleted so you’re not part of the overall user count, but I honestly don’t care that much. And doing all that just to state you’re signing up someplace where they promise to wear slippers to kick you to death with so it doesn’t hurt so much… well, good luck.
Source: Warren Ellis
Image: Sven Brandsma
Some wise words from Dan Sinker about how we need to reclaim the internet — and why.
I’ve been thinking recently about how anti-fascist writing circulated in Germany after Hitler’s rise. Called tarnschriften, or “hidden writings,” these pocket-sized essays, news updates, and how-tos were hidden inside the covers of mundane, everyday materials.
Get a few pages in to Der Kanarienvogel, “a practical handbook on the natural history, care, and breeding of the canary” and you’re no longer reading about how “the canary is one of the loveliest creatures on earth,” but instead getting the latest updates on the anti-Nazi resistance efforts of the German Communist Party.
[…]
We need to build new things in new ways independent of the oligarchs that now control the government after already controlling much of our lives.
That means moving away from the platforms that have dominated the way we’ve connected, collaborated, and disseminated information for the last couple decades. The rise of mass social platforms has been at the cost of a truly independent, truly open internet. But it’s still there. You can still build anything on it, free of platforms and the overreach of monopolists and oligarchs.
It also means reacquainting ourselves with offline connections. We’ve built for scale for so long (in our software and in our focus on swelling our own follower counts) that we’ve forgotten the power of a handful of people around a table. It’s time to stop chasing scale and start chasing the right people. Spread information table to table, person to person. 1:1 is everything right now.
And while we’re talking offline, let’s talk about making physical media again: music that can’t be taken away with a keystroke, movies that don’t involve a subscription, and news, writing, art and more that can be copied and printed and handed person-to-person—inside seed packets or not.
We have to become the media that has collapsed. Pick up the pieces and build anew. Build robust. Build independent.
Source: Dan Sinker
Image: Bryan McGowan
I received Craig Mod’s most recent newsletter in which he referenced a previous issue from last year. In that prior issue, he talked about ‘digital reading in 2024’ in which I mostly focused on his discussion of the mobile phone-size BOOX Palma e-ink tablet.
However, he also talked about a company called Readwise which he advises. They’ve got a product, “a fabulous long form reading, meta-data-editing, article-organizing platform called Reader” which I’ve been experimenting with today. My workflow is usually based on Pocket, but it feels a bit disorganised and out-of-date in 2025. Reader has features such as the ability to highlight and import anything from the web, automatic article summaries, PDF import, all while also acting as a feed reader and somewhere you can send newsletters.
I have no affiliation, but it’s impressed me today. While Craig Mod likes his BOOX Palma, I prefer my full-size BOOX Note Air 2 e-ink tablet and Google Pixel Fold. Both are Android-based, and so both will be perfect for the Reader app. I’ll perhaps follow-up when I’ve got my workflow more set up. (It’s $9.99/month once my month-long free trial finishes, but I should be able to get 50% off as a student!)
The Readwise Reader app imports long form articles with aplomb. Parses them almost always perfectly, and paginates fabulously. It also OCRs non-insanely-typeset PDFs into device-sized typographic goodness.
[…]
Some things I adore about Readwise Reader: Solid typography, excellent pagination (seriously, I love how they paginate articles — vertically, sensibly, for easy highlighting across page boundaries), being able to double-tap on a paragraph to highlight the whole thing (much easier than fiddling with sentence highlights, and often you want paragraph context anyway), and built in “ghost reader” functions which provide LLM-based summaries (useful to quickly remember why you saved a particular article) and also LLM-based dictionary / encyclopedia definitions (which have so far been pretty good? although I’d love to be able to load my own dictionaries into the system). I also love that Reader’s web app feels like a kind of “control center” that allows for easy editing of article metadata and more. Install the Obsidian plugin, and you have a full repository of reading history and notes, in Markdown, on your local machine. Reader also has Chrome / Safari plugins that make for one-tap adding to your article Inbox. If you copy a URL and open the Reader App, it’ll automagically ask if you want to add that article to your queue. Lots of nice affordances.
[…]
Readwise, too, is an interesting company. Bootstrapped. No breathless whispering of Mark Andreessen across some gilded dinner table. Just a real company making real money by selling useful services around reading. What a thing!
Source: Roden
My LinkedIn and Bluesky account has been full of pretty much two things today: the 80th International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and a new Chinese AI model called DeepSeek r1.
There have been many, many hot takes about the latter. I’m not here to do anything other than point out how awesome it is that this runs offline, is Open Source, and has been trained for 100x less than the equivalent models provided by American companies such as OpenAI, Meta, et al. I also included the image at the top because how much this has to conform to the official Chinese government ideology is, of course, one of the first thing that any self-respecting techie will want to test.
As usual, if you’re going to read someone’s opinion about all of this, Ryan Broderick is your guy. Here’s part of what he said in his newsletter Garbage Day which, if you’re not subscribing to at this point, I’m not sure what you’re doing with your life.
Now, we don’t yet know how the American AI industry will react to DeepSeek, but OpenAI’s Sam Altman announced on Saturday that free ChatGPT users are getting access to a more advanced model. Likely as a way to quickly respond to the DeepSeek hype. Meta are also frantically beefing up their own AI tools. But it’s hard to imagine how American AI companies can compete after they spent the last four years insisting that they need infinite money to buy infinite computing power to accomplish what is now open source. DeepSeek r1 can even run without an internet connection. So it’s possible that OpenAI, the biggest money sink of all, may, as cognitive scientist and AI critic Gary Marcus wrote today, “some day been seen as the WeWork of AI.” And that some day might be sooner than you think. The mood is changing fast. El Salvador’s hustle bro millennial dictator Nayib Bukele posted on X over the weekend, “So, [more than] 95% of the cost of developing new AI models is purely overhead?”
But, like TikTok, it’s doubtful that American tech oligarchs are actually capable of accepting how screwed they are because AI is not just a massive pyramid scheme to them. It has ballooned out into a psuedo-religion. And Andreessen has spent the last week frantically posting through it, doing his best impression of a doomsday evangelist trying to convince his flock that, yes, he knew that the roadmap was changing and that, yes, the promised revelation is still coming.
“A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero,” he wrote on X, quivering in his shell. “Everything you need and want for pennies.” Everything, it seems, also includes AI.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: Alexios Mantzarlis
I saw something recently which suggested that, in the US at least, the number of jobs for software developers peaked in 2019 and has been going down ever since. Good job everyone didn’t retrain as programmers, then.
There are any number of think tanks and policy outlets which tell you what they think the future of work, society, economy, etc. will be like. Of course, none of these organisations is neutral and, at the end of the day, all have a worldview to foist upon the rest of us. The World Economic Forum is one of these bodies and, as Audrey Watters discusses in her latest missive, it predicts the most ridiculous things.
I remember reading Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani when it came out, pre-pandemic. I was optimistic about the role of technology, including AI, as a way of providing everyone’s needs. But the way that it’s actually being rolled-out, especially post-pandemic, when the hypercapitalists and neo-fascists have removed their masks, has left me somewhat more fearful.
It’s a broad generalisation, but you’ve essentially got two options in your working life: you can be part of the problem, or you can be part of the solution. Sadly, there’s a lot of money to be made in being part of the problem.
Reports issued by the World Economic Forum and the like are a kind of “futurology” – speculation, predictive modeling, planning for the future. “Futurology” and its version of “futurism” emerged in the mid-twentieth century as an attempt to control (and transform) the Cold War world through new kinds of knowledge production and social engineering, new technologies of knowledge production and social engineering to be more precise. (This futurism is different than the Marinetti version, the fascist version. Different-ish.) As Jenny Andersson writes in her history of post-war “future studies,” The Future of the World, these “predictive techniques rarely sought to produce objective representation of a probable future; they tried, rather, to find potential levers with which to influence human action.” These techniques, such as the Delphi method popularized by RAND, are highly technocratic — maybe even “cybernetic”? — and are deeply, deeply intertwined with not just economic forecasting, but with military scenario planning.
[…]
Futurology has always tried to sell a shiny, exciting vision for tomorrow — that is, as I argued above, what it was designed to do. But all this — all this — feels remarkably grim, despite the happy drumbeat. Without a radical adjustment to these plans for energy usage and for knowledge automation, jobs of the future seem likely entail things much less glamorous (or highly paid) than the invented work that get touted in headlines (and here again, the call for this “masculine energy” sort of shit invoked the explicitly fascist elements of futurism).
[…]
The jobs of the future will involve cleaning up environmental and political and epistemological disaster. They will involve care, for the human and more-than-human world. Of course, that’s always been the work. That’s always been the consequence, always the fallout — the caretakers of the world already know.
Source: Second Breakfast (paywalled for members)
Image: Markus Spiske
In this searing essay by R.H. Lossin, the first of an eventual two-parter, she takes aim at the absurdity of using generative AI for anything other than propping up the existing, dominant culture. Citing Raymond Williams' Culture and Materialism, Lossin explains that AI is the perfect tool for continually remaking cultural hegemony, for creating a normative ‘vibe’ which prevents reflection on what is really going on underneath the surface.
This is the first time, I think, that I’ve come across e-flux, which “spans numerous strains of critical discourse in art, architecture, film, and theory, and connects many of the most significant art institutions with audiences around the world.” Suffice to say, I’ve subscribed, so there will be more from this outlet featured on Thought Shrapnel over the coming weeks and months.
“Hegemony,” wrote Raymond Williams, “is the continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture.” The concept of hegemony was used by Williams as a way to rescue culture from a reductive and one-way formulation of base and superstructure, where the base—Fordist manufacturing for example—is the cause of the superstructure or all things “merely cultural.” Rather, hegemony places literature, paintings, films, dance, television, music, and so on at the center of how a dominant culture rules or how a ruling class dominates. This is not to assert that art is propaganda for capitalism (although sometimes it is). Nor is it to revert to theories of “art for art’s sake” and the normative metaphysics of liberal cultural criticism (Art’s social value is its independence from politics. What about “beauty”? etc.). According to Williams’s theory of hegemony, art is one way of enlisting our desire in the “making and remaking” our own domination. But desire is unstable and, as an important part of maintaining a dominant culture, art is also, potentially, a means of its unmaking.
Hegemony, it should be noted, is not non-violent. It is always backed up by force, but it allows power to maintain itself without constant recourse to the police or justice system. Within the boundaries of an imperial power at least, hegemony allows ruling classes to govern with the enthusiastic consent and participation of subjects who assume that, for all of its problems, this social order is worth preserving in some form. Hegemony is most effective when it is experienced as sentiment (this movie is “fun to watch,” that immersive experience is “cool”) and understood as common sense (technology is not the problem, it is just used badly by capitalists).
[…]
As datasets continue to increase quantitatively, their fascist exclusions are concealed by the extent of their extraction, but they are no more universal than the universalism of, say, the European Enlightenment. The repetitive, homogenous output of image generators and their non-relation to distinct inputs, even the uneasy intuition that you’ve seen it somewhere already, demonstrates the extent of this exclusion. In a structure that mimics the extractive devastation required to power these screen dreams, the more data it collects the more thoroughly decimated the informational landscape becomes. Rather than the adage “garbage in, garbage out,” favored by computer scientists and statisticians, AI’s transformation of inputs into visual objects is a matter of “value in, garbage out.” Art collection in, garbage out; literature in, garbage out; apples in, garbage out; human subject in, garbage out; Indigenous lifeways in, garbage out.
We are aware of the capacity of capitalism to co-opt oppositional cultural practices. However, not everything is equally visible to the dominant gaze. Because “the internal structures” of hegemony—such as artistic production and institutional promotion—“have continually to be renewed, recreated, and defended,” writes Williams, “they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified.” The dominant culture will always overlook certain “sources of actual human practice,” and this leaves us with what Williams calls residual and emergent practices. Practices that have escaped, momentarily, or been forgotten by this oppressive selection process; fugitive practices that offer some extant, counterhegemonic possibilities. This is precisely why the “democratic” tendency of ever-expanding datasets is disturbing rather than comforting. It is also why a defense against the oppressive expansion of generative AI needs to be sought outside of a neural network in actual social relationships.
Source: e-flux
Image: Loey Felipe (taken from the article)
A few years ago, on one of my much-neglected ‘other’ blogs, I exhorted readers to sit with ambiguity for a longer than they would do normally. In that post, I focused on innovation projects. But our lack of tolerance for ambiguity is everywhere.
In this article, Adam Mastroianni discusses ‘attribute substitution’. It’s an heuristic, a shorthand way that our brains work so that we can answer easier questions rather than harder ones. Although it can lend us a bias towards action, it’s kind of the opposite of living a reflective life influenced by historical insight and philosophical analysis.
The cool thing about attribute substitution is that it makes all of human decision making possible. If someone asks you whether you would like an all-expenses-paid two-week trip to Bali, you can spend a millisecond imagining yourself sipping a mai tai on a jet ski, and go “Yes please.” Without attribute substitution, you’d have to spend two weeks picturing every moment of the trip in real time (“Hold on, I’ve only made it to the continental breakfast”). That’s why humans are the only animals who get to ride jet skis, with a few notable exceptions.
The uncool thing about attribute substitution is that it’s the main source of human folly and misery. The mind doesn’t warn you that it’s replacing a hard question with an easy one by, say, ringing a little bell; if it did, you’d hear nothing but ding-a-ling from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall back asleep. Instead, the swapping happens subconsciously, and when it goes wrong—which it often does—it leaves no trace and no explanation. It’s like magically pulling a rabbit out of a hat, except 10% of the time, the rabbit is a tarantula instead.
I think a lot of us are walking around with undiagnosed cases of attribute substitution gone awry. We routinely outsource important questions to the brain’s intern, who spends like three seconds Googling, types a few words into ChatGPT (the free version) and then is like, “Here’s that report you wanted.”
[…]
Confusion, like every emotion, is a signal: it’s the ding-a-ling that tells you to think harder because things aren’t adding up. That’s why, as soon as we unlock the ability to feel confused, we also start learning all sorts of tricks for avoiding it in the first place, lest we ding-a-ling ourselves to death. That’s what every heuristic is—a way of short-circuiting our uncertainty, of decreasing the time spent scratching our heads so we can get back to what really matters (putting car keys in our mouths).
I think it’s cool that my mind can do all these tricks, but I’m trying to get comfortable scratching my head a little longer. Being alive is strange and mysterious, and I’d like to spend some time with that fact while I’ve got the chance, to visit the jagged shoreline where the bit that I know meets the infinite that I don’t know, and to be at peace sitting there a while, accompanied by nothing but the ring of my own confusion and the crunch of delicious car keys.
Source: Experimental History
Image: Brett Jordan
I don’t really understand people who look at billionaires as anything other than an aberration of the system. They are not, in any way, people to be looked up to, imitated, or praised.
What probably makes it easier for me is that I see pretty much every form of hierarchical organisation-for-profit as something to be avoided. The CEO who employs downward pressure on wages, resists unionisation, and enjoys the fruits of other people’s labour, is merely different in terms of scale.
If multi-millionaires exist out of the normal cycle of everyday life, billionaires certainly do. That alone makes them spectacularly unfit to be anywhere near the levers of power, to dictate economic policy, or to make pronouncements that anyone in their right mind should listen to.
It’s a mind-bogglingly large sum of money, so let’s try to make it meaningful in day-to-day terms. If someone gave you $1,000 every single day and you didn’t spend a cent, it would take you three years to save up a million dollars. If you wanted to save a billion, you’d be waiting around 2,740 years… All this shows how the personal wealth of billionaires cannot be made through hard work alone. The accumulation of extreme wealth depends on other systems, such as exploitative labor practices, tax breaks, and loopholes that are beyond the reach of most ordinary people.
[…]
The notion that a billionaire has worked hard for every penny of their wealth is simply fanciful. The median U.S. salary is $34,612, but even if you tripled that and saved every penny for a lifetime, you still wouldn’t accumulate anywhere close to a billion dollars. Here, it’s also worth looking at Oxfam’s extensive study on extreme wealth, which found that approximately one-third of global billionaire fortunes were inherited. It’s not about working harder, smarter, or better. There are many factors built into our economic system that help extreme wealth to multiply fast. It’s a matter of being well-placed to benefit from the structures that favor capital and produce a profit off the back of exploitation.
[…]
Jeff Bezos could give every single one of his 876,000 employees a $105,000 bonus and he’d still be as rich as he was at the start of the pandemic.
[…]
It’s true that the billionaire class creates jobs and that wages have the potential to drive the economy, but that argument falters when workers barely have enough to survive. The potential to generate tax dollars from billion-dollar profits is enormous. Oxfam found that if the world’s richest 1% paid just 0.5% more in tax, we could educate all 262 million children who are currently out of school and provide health care to save the lives of 3.3 million. But given generous tax cuts and easily exploitable loopholes like the ability to register wealth in offshore tax havens, this rarely comes to pass.
[…]
Some favor the adoption of universal social security measures, paid for via progressive taxes. It’s been argued that Universal Basic Income, Guaranteed Minimum Income, and Universal Basic Services could aid prosperity in a world grappling with growing populations, societal aging, and climate breakdown. Piecemeal proposals are not enough to remedy a crisis of poverty in the midst of plenty. And a fair world would not further the acceleration of either.
Source: Teen Vogue
Image: Adam Nir
I think it’s important to pay attention to what’s happening in the so-called “gig economy” as it’s effectively what capitalists would do to all of us if they could get away with it. In this case, The Guardian looks at couriers working for apps such as Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo.
Sure enough, the couriers have no real idea what’s going on in terms of allocation of work. So they turn to workarounds and conspiracy theories. I can’t imagine this being good for anyone’s mental health.
The couriers wonder why someone who has only just logged on gets a gig while others waiting longer are overlooked. Why, when the restaurant is busy and crying out for couriers, does the app say there are none available?
“We can never work out the algorithm,” one of the drivers says, requesting anonymity for fear of losing work. They wonder if the app ignores them if they’ve done a few jobs already that hour, and experiment with standing inside the restaurant, on the pavement or in the car park to see if subtle shifts in geolocation matter.
“It’s an absolute nightmare,” says the driver, adding that they permanently lost access to one of the platforms over a matter of a “max five minutes” wait in getting to a restaurant while he finished another job for a different app. Sometimes he gets logged out for a couple of hours because his beard has grown, confusing the facial recognition software.
“It’s not at all like being an employee,” he says. He is regularly frustrated by having to challenge what appeared to be shortfall in pay per job – sometimes just 10p, but at other times a few pounds. “There’s nobody you can talk to. Everything is automated.”
[…]
“Every worker should understand the basis on which they are paid,” [James] Farrar said [who has a lot of experience with gig economy apps]. “But you’re being gamed into deciding whether to accept a job or not. Will I get a better offer? It’s like gambling and it’s very distressing and stressful for people.
“You are completely in a vacuum about how best to do the job and because people often don’t understand how decisions are being made about their work, it encourages conspiracies.”
Source: The Guardian
Image: Sargis Chilingaryan
It has been A Week. So I’ve only just caught up Jay Springett’s weeknote from last week, in which he talks about the $TRUMP memecoin. Money hasn’t had any intrinsic value since the major currencies left the gold standard decades ago. Memecoins are like cryptocurrencies on steroids.
TRUMP Coin has sort of got lost in the noise in UK media due to the Tiktok shut down. But its way way way more insane, and way more significant news. In the last 48 hours Trump’s net worth increased by FIFTY BILLION (ILLIQUID) DOLLARS. Just days before he becomes president.
Jay quotes himself about real time attention markets and ‘economic entertainment’. It’s fascinating, especially if you read books like Clay Shirky’s Here Cones Everybody back in the day:
The rise of real time attention markets, economic entertainment, prediction markets (and the coming era of Power Fandoms) are a kind of revenge of late 90’s early 00’s Utopianism. The idea of cognitive surplus. We’re starting to see the kinds of swarm/group intelligences predicted by Shirky / Tapscott – but distorted through contemporary capitalism’s relentless logic. It took super liquid markets and meme coins for them to emerge.
He and some others have been discussing what all this means which led to a post by RM which channels the TV show Black Mirror. Even reading about this kind of stuff makes me feel about a million years old:
Personally, seeing your “value” as a volatile ticker must be truly psychologically draining. Imagine scaling that to a presidency. One day, your market cap soars; the next, an unpopular move collapses the coin. It’s like living in a Black Mirror episode where “market cap” equals self-worth and “24h volume” measures relevance.
[…]
Is this the world’s most ingenious social experiment, rewriting power, brand, and money dynamics? Or an accidental time bomb threatening presidential credibility? Unlike stocks reacting to politics, this directly monetizes an individual’s persona, allowing real-time buying and selling of reputation.
What does all of this mean in practice? I have no idea.
Source: thejaymo
Image: Maxim Hopman
It sounds like the UK government is preparing to bring in a dedicated app, initially for digital driving licenses — as is happening elsewhere in the world — but eventually for everything from tax payment to benefit claims and reminding people what their National Insurance number is.
This is a fascinating area for me, for a couple of reasons. First, the technology mentioned (“allowing users to hide their addresses in certain situations”) make me think this is very likely to be based on the Verifiable Credentials standard. This is the one that Open Badges, which I’ve been working on now for 14 years, is based.
Second, there’s a huge resistance in this country to the idea of ID cards. That means initiatives such as this can aim for the kind of utility which ID cards would provide, but have to present in such a way that is not ‘ID card-like’. Perhaps an app that focuses on providing immediate value in several area will help with this.
Third, and finally, I’m delighted that it seems that the GOV.UK team which will be behind this have decided not to go with a solution based on Google/Apple wallets. It would have been a terrible decision to do that, akin to handing over the keys to the digital kingdom to non-state actors.
The virtual wallet is understood to have security measures similar to many banking apps, and only owners of respective licences will be able to access it through inbuilt security features in smartphones, such as biometrics and multi-factor authentication.
The voluntary digital option is to be introduced later this year, according to the Times. Possible features include allowing users to hide their addresses in certain situations, such as in bars or shops, and using virtual licences for age verification at supermarket self-checkouts.
The government is said to be considering integrating other services into the app, such as tax payments, benefits claims and other forms of identification such as national insurance numbers, but will stop short of introducing compulsory national ID cards, which were pushed for by former prime minister Tony Blair and William Hague.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Robin Worrall
Next time someone even suggests that education is merely the means of eventually finding ‘employment’ I’m just going to 301 redirect them to this magnificent rant by my extraordinarily talented colleague, Laura Hilliger.
I will be brief because some of my readers are not here for educational philosophy. For decades many in my network have championed actual education, the long-stretch goal of which is essentially self-actualisation. This is a term popularised by Maslow, but even Aristotle was pontificating about our human states of becoming. Education is, briefly, not only acquiring skills but realising our free will, potential and unique unicorn properties so that we can survive the shitshow that is existence. At least until we’re dead, education’s purpose to help us survive and thrive, not just get a job.
In society, education is both contrasted and conflated with other terms like learning, training or skill development. The field is semantically messy, and at the end of the day many don’t care about actual education. For society writ-large, the purpose of education is not self-actualisation, but rather compliance, conformance and control. I’m not talking about educators, you fluffy, beautiful bandits of resistance leaders, I’m talking about the systems around and through which people have access to education. Learning to learn, being intellectually curious, bravely looking the human condition in the face – these are not economically responsible endeavours. Thus, they have traditionally been reserved for the privileged (and the possessed).
Source: Freshly Brewed Thoughts
Matt Web thinks that countries need to be thinking about building a ‘strategic fact reserve’. It’s an interesting proposition but also… how has it come to this?!
[I]f I were to rank AI (not today’s AI but once it is fully developed and integrated) I’d say it’s probably not as critical as infrastructure or capacity as energy, food or an education system.
But probably it’s probably on par with GPS. Which underpins everything from logistics to automating train announcements to retail.
[…]
I think we’re all assuming that the Internet Archive will remain available as raw feedstock, that Wikipedia will remain as a trusted source of facts to steer it; that there won’t be a shift in copyright law that makes it impossible to mulch books into matrices, and that governments will allow all of this data to cross borders once AI becomes part of national security.
Everything I’ve said is super low likelihood, but the difficulty with training data is that you can’t spend your way out of the problem in the future. The time to prepare is now.
[…]
Probably the best way to start is to take a snapshot of the internet and keep it somewhere really safe. We can sift through it later; the world’s data will never be more available or less contaminated than it is today. Like when GitHub stored all public code in an Arctic vault (02/02/2020): a very-long-term archival facility 250 meters deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain. Or the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But actually I think this is a job for librarians and archivists.
Source: Interconnected
Image: Kathryn Conrad
I grew up under a government led by Margaret Thatcher. Thatcherism was a rejection of solidarity, the welfare state, unions, and a belief in neoliberalism, austerity, and British nationalism. It an absolute breath of fresh air, therefore, when in 1997 as a 16 year old I witnessed ‘New’ Labour sweeping to victory in the General Election.
What followed was revolutionary, at least in the place I grew up: Surestart centres, investment in public services, and a real sense of togetherness throughout society. They lost power 15 years ago, and the period of Tory rule up to the middle of last year introduced Austerity 2.0, the polarisation of society, and chronic underfunding of the NHS and other essential services.
It’s surprising, therefore, that the first six months of Keir Starmer’s Labour government hasn’t felt like much of a change from the Tory status quo. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the recent announcement that AI will be ‘mainlined into the veins’ of the UK, using rhetoric one would expect from the right wing of politics. As I read one person on social media as saying, this would have been very different had Starmer and co been seeking the support of the TUC and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
I’ve been listening to Helen Beetham’s new podcast in which she interviews Dan McQuillan, author of Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. It’s not one of those episodes where you can be casually doing something else and half-listening, which is why I haven’t finished it yet. It has, however, prompted me to explore Dan’s blog, which is where I came across this post on ‘AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism’, written in late 2023,
It’s extraordinarily disingenous for the government to say that the move proposed is going to ‘create jobs’, as the explicit goal of ‘efficiency’ is to remove bottlenecks. Those are usually human-shaped. Maybe we should stop speedrunning towards dystopia? We need to prepare for post-capitalism; it’s just a shame that our government is doubling down on hypercapitalism.
One thing that these models definitely do, though, is transfer control to large corporations. The amount of computing power and data required is so incomprehensibly vast that very few companies in the world have the wherewithal to train them. To promote large language models anywhere is privatisation by the back door. The evidence so far suggests that this will be accompanied by extensive job losses, as employers take AI’s shoddy emulation of real tasks as an excuse to trim their workforce. The goal isn’t to “support” teachers and healthcare workers but to plug the gaps with AI instead of with the desperately needed staff and resources.
Real AI isn’t sci-fi but the precaritisation of jobs, the continued privatisation of everything and the erasure of actual social relations. AI is Thatcherism in computational form. Like Thatcher herself, real world AI boosts bureaucratic cruelty towards the most vulnerable. Case after case, from Australia to the Netherlands, has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor. AI doesn’t provide insights as it’s just a giant statistical guessing game. What it does do is amplify thoughtlessness, a lack of care, and a distancing from actual consequences. The logics of ranking and superiority are buried deep in the make up of artificial intelligence; married to populist politics, it becomes another vector for deciding who is disposable.
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Shouldn’t we be resisting this gigantic, carbon emitting version of automated Thatcherism before it’s allowed to trash our remaining public services? It might be tempting to wait for a Labour victory at the next election; after all, they claim to back workplace protections and the social contract. Unfortunately they aren’t likely to restrain AI; if anything, the opposite. Under the malign influence of true believers like the Tony Blair Institute, whose vision for AI is a kind of global technocratic regime change, Labour is putting its weight behind AI as an engine of regeneration. It looks like stopping the megamachine is going to be down to ordinary workers and communities. Where is Ned Ludd when you need him?
Source: danmcquillan.org
Image: Mike Newbry
You may have noticed that nostalgia is, well, a vibe at the moment. Why is that? Because the present kinda sucks. Why does it suck? Because we live in completely unequal societies, increasingly ruled by demagogues.
Umair Haque, who used to be omni-present pre-pandemic on Medium seems to now have his own Ghost-powered publication and has written about post-capitalism. It’s long, with short paragraphs, and lots of italicising. But he knows what he’s talking about.
I’ve excerpted the key points, but I’d recommend clicking through and looking at the bullet point list of things he suggests reorientating one’s life and career towards. It was pretty reaffirming for me, with a January of not really enough work on, to know that getting a corporate job isn’t really a long-term solution.
The idea of late capitalism means all that. It means that people are immiserated, exploited, ruined, left desperate. That inequality soars. That there’s no future. That societies lose hope. But instead of coming together and having some kind of constructive revolution, and here we don’t have to agree with Marx, they have a fascist meltdown, which I think we can all agree is a Bad Thing.
People turn on one another. Societies shut down. Companies turn ultra-predatory. Cronyism runs rampant. Economies slide into depression. And instead of some form of positive collective action, the answer to all this tends to be conflict, and maybe even World War.
That’s late capitalism. It’s not just “this is dystopia” or “everything sucks” or even “I’m exploited to the bone.” It has that historical meaning, the very specific one: instead of doing anything positive, making wise decisions, people turn regressive, lose their thinking minds, turn on each other, and instead of the sort of class war Marx envisioned, turn to demagogues who end up starting very real ones instead.
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If you’re middle aged, I’d bet that the above is already beginning to happen to you. You’re being forced out, at least if you’re in a corporate career. Every mistake isn’t just “I could lose the promotion,” it turned into “I could lose this job,” and now it’s, “that’s the end of my career, because I’ll never find another one.”
Understand that and face it. It is true. This trend of forcing middle aged people out—no matter what their accomplishments are—is here to stay now. It is never going away. This is what the “job market” is and will be for the rest of our lives, and probably beyond, because what did we learn earlier? Late capitalism recurs. It isn’t even a “stage,” as Marx’s descendants thought, but something more like a chronic condition. And we, unfortunately, have it.
[…]
The time has come now for many, many people to forge post-capitalist lives, careers, professions, and futures. They might not know it yet. Their despair and bewilderment is a reflection of how little this guiding principle is discussed, understood, or talked about. That doesn’t mean that they all have to go out and be activists or revolutionaries, lol, not at all, we just discussed how being a creator is something that’s post-capitalist.
[…]
What does it mean to “be a post-capitalist"? Many of us are starting to find out. It means running a network, community, organization, thingie, maybe a business, in certain dimensions but not along strictly profit-maximizing capitalist lines, but more humanistic ones, in a sense, and that’s not a bad thing, when you think about it.
Source: the issue.
Image: Kevin Jarrett
Years ago, I read The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. It was so long ago that it was the first time I’d been introduced to Seneca’s observation that you can travel, but you can’t escape yourself.
This article by Phillipa Perry — whose books How to Stay Sane and The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will be Glad That You Did) I’d highly recommend — points out that many of our problems stem from (how we conceptualise) our relationships with others.
Often, we believe the solution to our problems lies outside ourselves, believing that if we leave the job, the relationship, everything will be fine. Of course, that can sometimes be true and it’s important to be alert to situations which are truly damaging. But the path towards feeling more connected to others usually starts from within. We must examine how we talk to ourselves, uncover the covert beliefs we live by, and confront the darker aspects of our psyche. One of the most disconnecting forces is our expectations of how others should be – but learning to accept people and things we cannot change can help us become more sanguine.
Source: The Guardian
Good stuff from Erik Hoel about, effectively, the need for more cultural criticism around the use of technology in society. Any article that appropriately quotes Neil Postman is alright by me, and the art (included here) from Alexander Naughton which accompanies the article? Wow.
[L]ately some decisions have been explicitly boundary-pushing in a shameless “Let’s speedrun to a bad outcome” way. I think most people would share the worry that a world where social media reactivity stems mainly from bots represents a step toward dystopia, a last severing of a social life that has already moved online. So news of these sorts of plans has come across to me about as sympathetically as someone putting on their monocle and practicing their Dr. Evil laugh in public.
Why the change? Why, especially, the brazenness?
Admittedly, any answer to this question will ignore some set of contributing causal factors. Here in the early days of the AI revolution, we suddenly have a bunch of new dimensions along which to move toward a dystopia, which means people are already fiddling with the sliders. That alone accounts for some of it.
But I think a major contributing cause is a more nebulous cultural reason, one outside tech itself, in that a certain brand of artistic criticism and commentary has become surprisingly rare. In the 20th century a mainstay of satire was skewering greedy corporate overreach, a theme that cropped up across different media and genres, from film to fiction. Many older examples are, well, obvious.
Source: The Intrinsic Perspective
Tom Watson wrote up a workshop he ran on organisational resilience recently, quoting and linking to one of Roger Swannell’s weeknotes about feedback loops. The full quotation from Swannell, taken from his blog, reads:
One of the insights I found interesting is that for feedback loops to work effectively, the feedback has to be orders of magnitude faster than the situation being controlled. So, if we’re shipping fortnightly, then the feedback would have to be hourly in order for us to have any sense of what effect we’re having. In practice, it’s usually the other way round and feedback is much slower than the situation.
Watson goes on to discuss this in terms of organisational resilience, mapping on single-loop _(Are we doing things right?__, double-loop (Are we doing the right things?), and triple-loop learning (How do we decide what’s right?) onto the “Anticipate, Prepare, Respond, Adapt” approach to organisational resilience.
Interestingly, the three things he suggests to help build organisational resilience (continual monitoring, open working, monthly reflections) are things central to our co-op:
[H]ere’s a couple of ideas to try that can help move our approach to learning forward.
Make sure your monitoring and metrics allow you to answer the question “Are we doing things right?” in a timely manner. Short timeframes are generally better. Align to any decisions you need to make.
Embrace open working - devote 20 -30 minutes a week to allow you and your team to reflect on what is going well, what isn’t, what is challenging, what people are seeing.
Put in monthly/quarterly sessions - maybe an hour where you explore the question “Why do we do it this way?” on a specific topic as a team. Use the weeknotes to start the culture of open reflection, use them to identify common topics that might be coming up.
Doing these 3 things will move you from being only in the Response phase, into anticipate and prepare phases. Or if you prefer from single to double loop learning.
Sources: Tomcw.xyz / Roger Swannell
Image: Aleksandr Popov
It’s about a decade since I gave up on Google search. While I use Google services extensively for work and other areas of my life, search and personal email are not two of them. Instead, I use DuckDuckGo and, more recently, Perplexity Pro.
The latter is excellent, bypassing advertising and paid placements, acting as a natural language search agent for synthesising information. I tend to use it for information that would take several searches. Yesterday, for example, I gave it the following query: “I need a tool that can automatically take screenshot of a web page and then stitch them together. It should then make an animated gif, scrolling through the page from top to bottom. The website requires a login, so ideally it should be a Chrome browser extension." It gave me several options, approaching my request from multiple angles as there wasn’t a solution that did exactly what I needed.
Although this article in MIT Technology Review mentions Perplexity, it weirdly focuses mainly on Google and OpenAI. There’s no mention that you can choose between LLMs in Perplexity (I use Claude 3.5 Haiku) and the two issues it raises are copyright and hallucinations, rather than sustainability and privacy. Claude 3.5 Haiku is one of the lighter weight models when it comes to environmental impact, but it still consumes a lot more energy (and water, to cool the data centres) than a single DuckDuckGo search.
And then, when it comes to privacy, while it’s great that an LLM can personalise results based on what it already knows about you, there’s an amount of trust there that I’m increasingly wary of giving to companies like OpenAI. I cancelled and then resubscribed to ChatGPT last week. I’m not sure how long I can stomach the Sam Altman circus.
Ultimately, agentic search, where you ask a question in natural language and it shows you the sources it used to synthesise the answer, is the future. Perplexity seems pretty fair in this regard, pulling in my colleague Laura’s post as part of a response about the way that technology has shifted power over the last century. For me, this kind of thing is even more of a reason to work in the open.
There’s a critical digital literacies issue here, one that’s hinted in the last paragraph of the article (included below) and discussed in Helen Beetham’s podcast episode with Dan MacQuillan, author of Resisting AI: an Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. When “the answer” is presented to you, there’s less incentive to do your own work in finding your own interpretation. I think that is definitely a risk. Although, given that the internet is a giant justification machine already, I’m entirely sure it will necessarily make things worse — just perhaps make people a bit lazier.
The biggest change to the way search engines have delivered information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. No more sorting through links to click. Instead, we’re entering an era of conversational search. Which means instead of keywords, you use real questions, expressed in natural language. And instead of links, you’ll increasingly be met with answers, written by generative AI and based on live information from all across the internet, delivered the same way.
More to the point, you can attempt searches that were once pretty much impossible, and get the right answer. You don’t have to be able to articulate what, precisely, you are looking for. You can describe what the bird in your yard looks like, or what the issue seems to be with your refrigerator, or that weird noise your car is making, and get an almost human explanation put together from sources previously siloed across the internet. It’s amazing, and once you start searching that way, it’s addictive.
[…]
Sure, we will always want to use search engines to navigate the web and to discover new and interesting sources of information. But the links out are taking a back seat. The way AI can put together a well-reasoned answer to just about any kind of question, drawing on real-time data from across the web, just offers a better experience. That is especially true compared with what web search has become in recent years. If it’s not exactly broken (data shows more people are searching with Google more often than ever before), it’s at the very least increasingly cluttered and daunting to navigate.
Who wants to have to speak the language of search engines to find what you need? Who wants to navigate links when you can have straight answers? And maybe: Who wants to have to learn when you can just know?
Source: MIT Technology Review
Image: Kathryn Conrad
A couple of months ago, I wrote a short post trying to define ‘AI slop’. It was the kind of post I write so that I can, myself, link back to something in passing as I write about related issues. It made me smile, therefore, that the (self-proclaimed) “world’s only lovable tech journalist” Mike Elgan included a link to it in a recent Computerworld article.
I’m surprised he didn’t link to the Wikipedia article on the subject, but then the reason I felt that I needed to write my post was that I didn’t feel the definitions there sufficed. I could have edited the article, but Wikipedia doesn’t include original content, and so I would have had to find a better definition instead of writing my own.
The interesting thing now is that I could potentially edit the Wikipedia article and include my definition because it’s been cited in Computerworld. But although I’ve got editing various pages of world’s largest online encyclopedia on my long-list of things to do, the reality is that I can’t be done with the politics. Especially at the moment.
According to Meta, the future of human connection is basically humans connecting with AI.
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Meta treats the dystopian “Dead Internet Theory” — the belief that most online content, traffic, and user interactions are generated by AI and bots rather than humans — as a business plan instead of a toxic trend to be opposed.
[…]
All this intentional AI fakery takes place on platforms where the biggest and most harmful quality is arguably bottomless pools of spammy AI slop generated by users without content-creation help from Meta.
The genre uses bad AI-generated, often-bizarre images to elicit a knee-jerk emotional reaction and engagement.
In Facebook posts, these “engagement bait” pictures are accompanied by strange, often nonsensical, and manipulative text elements. The more “successful” posts have religious, military, political, or “general pathos” themes (sad, suffering AI children, for example).
The posts often include weird words. Posters almost always hashtag celebrity names. Many contain information about unrelated topics, like cars. Many such posts ask, “Why don’t pictures like this ever trend?”
These bizarre posts — anchored in bad AI, bad taste, and bad faith — are rife on Facebook.
You can block AI slop profiles. But they just keep coming — believe me, I tried. Blocking, reporting, criticizing, and ignoring have zero impact on the constant appearance of these posts, as far as I can tell.
Source: Computerworld
Image: pepe nero
I hate LinkedIn. I hate the the performativity, the way it makes me feel unworthy, as not enough. I hate the way that it promotes a particular mindset and approach to the world which does not mesh with my values.. I also hate the fact that you can’t be unduly critical of the platform itself (try it: “something is wrong, try again later” the pop-up messag insists)
This post by Amy Santee, which I discovered via a link from Matt Jukes, lists a lot of things wrong with the platform. I’ve quit LinkedIn before, but then felt like I needed to return a decade ago when becoming a consultant. And that’s the reason I stay: with the demise of Twitter, the only reliable way I can get in touch with the remnants of my professional community is through LinkedIn.
It really sucks. I appreciate what Santee suggests in terms of connecting with people via a newsletter, but that feels too broadcast-like for me. I crave community, not self-serving replies on ‘content’.
The mass tech layoffs of 2022-2024 have resulted in an explosion of people looking for work in an awful market where there just aren’t enough jobs in some fields like recruiting, product design, user research, and even engineering and game development (the latter of which are faring better).
As a result, LinkedIn has become a hellish waiting room giving off Beetlejuice vibes, where unfortunate souls are virtually required to spend inordinate amounts of time scavenging for jobs, filling out redundant applications, performing professionalism and feigning excitement in their posts, and bootlicking the companies that laid them off.
[…]
We labor and post and connect and cross our fingers in desperation, getting sucked into the noise, customizing our feeds (this makes me imagine cows at a trough), scrolling and searching and DMing, trying to beat the algorithm (just post a selfie!) or do something to stand out, all with the hopes of obtaining a prized golden ticket to participate in capitalism for a damn paycheck. We feel bad about ourselves and want to give up when someone else somehow gets a job. We may joke about our own demise. We share that we are about to become homeless or that we’re skipping meals. We express our anger at the system, and we’re more aware than ever before of other people’s suffering at the hands of this system.
[…]
The way I experience the algorithm is that it seems to randomly decide whether or not my posts are worth showing other people, or at least it feels that way because I don’t understand how it works. Linkedin definitely isn’t forthright about it. In its current form, the algorithm can be prohibitive for getting my ideas out there, having conversations, sharing my podcast episodes and blog posts, getting people to attend my events, and doing any of the stuff I used to enjoy about this place.
[…]
The execs and shareholders of LinkedIn (acquired by Microsoft in 2016) are the primary beneficiaries in all of this, and they will do anything to keep their monopolistic grip on our time, our lives, and our data (we are the product, too). This is all on purpose. LinkedIn continues to win big from the explosion in user activity, ad revenue, subscriptions, job posting fees, unpaid AI training via “Top Voice” user content, and the gobs of our data we gift them, in exchange for the displeasure of being linked in until hopefully something else comes around.
Source: The Jaw Breaker Weekly-ish
Image: Kim Menikh
One of the things that I spend a lot of my time doing every week is watching football (soccer). Yet I don’t write about it anywhere. Whether it’s watching one of our teenagers in matches every weekend, or professionals play in stadiums or on TV, there’s a reason it’s called “the beautiful game”.
As a sucker for all things Adidas, I accrue a number of points each year in their ‘Adiclub’ members area which are of a “use it or lose it” nature. Having heard good things about The Athletic, a publication created by two former Strava employees who sold it to The New York Times in 2022, I exchanged some points for a year’s subscription. I have to say I’m already hooked.
The depth is staggering and the use of images fantastic. Here, for example, are articles on the issues around redeveloping Newcastle United’s stadium, the reason that Trent Alexander-Arnold had such a poor game against Manchester United, and a wonderful article (which I sent to my daughter) about the art of ‘scanning’ for midfield players. The use of gifs in the latter is 👌
I realise that this reads like a sponsored post, and I’m not a big fan of the editorial cowardice shown by The New York Times, but this is me just pointing out the good stuff. If you consider yourself a sports fan, I’d highly recommend getting yourself access.
Source: The Athletic
The UK’s Online Safety Act is due to come into effect soon (17th March 2025), and everyone seems to be a bit confused about it. For example, I filled in the online self-assessment tool on behalf of one of our clients, who we helped set up an online forum last year. It looks like they’re going to have to carry out an impact assessment.
Rachel Coldicutt has been doing some work, including reaching out to Ofcom, the communications regulator. The best mental model I’ve got for what she’s found is that it’s a bit like GDPR. Except people are even less aware and organised.
For volunteers and small activist organisations, it just becomes yet another layer of bureaucracy to deal with. Although “small low-risk user-to-user services” are defined as “fewer than 7 million users” I can imagine this will have a negative effect on people thinking about setting up, or continuing to run, online community groups.
Five things you need you run a small, low-risk user-to-user service This is set out in more detail on pages 2-5 of this document and can be summarised as follows.
have an individual accountable for illegal content safety duties and reporting and complaints duties a content moderation function to review and assess illegal and suspected illegal content, with swift takedown measures an easy-to-find and user complaints system and process, backed up by an appropriate process to deal with complaints and appeals, with the exception of manifestly unfounded claims easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions the ability to remove accounts for proscribed organisations
Source: Promising Trouble
Image: 𝙂𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙤𝙧𝙮 𝙂𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙜𝙤𝙨
On the one hand, I really like this new ‘Bridging Dictionary’ from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication. On the other hand, it kind of presupposes that people on each side of the political spectrum argue in good faith and are interested in the other side’s opinion.
To be honest, it feels like the kind of website we used to see a decade ago when we we’d started to see the impact of people getting their news via algorithm-based social media feeds.
The most interesting thing for me, given that I get the majority of my news from centrist and centre-left publications, is seeing which words tend to be used by, for example, Fox News. The equivalent here in the UK, I guess, would be GB News or the Daily Mail.
Welcome to the Bridging Dictionary, a dynamic prototype from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication that identifies how words common in American political discourse are used differently across the political divide. In addition to contrasting usage by the political left and right, the dictionary identifies some less polarizing–or bridging–alternatives.
Source: BridgingDictionary.org
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you should by now be aware of the news that Meta products, including Facebook and Instagram, will replace teams of content moderators with ‘community notes’.
People on social media seem to think that merely linking to a bad news story and telling their network that “this is bad” is in any way a form of protest or activism. Not using stuff is protest; doing something about Meta’s influence in the world is activism.
Anyway, the best take I’ve seen on this whole thing is, unsurprisingly, from Ryan Broderick, who not only diagnoses what’s happened over the last four years, but predicts what will happen as a result. The only good thing to come of this whole debacle is that there have been some fantastic parody news stories, including this one.
[C]ontent moderation, as we’ve understood, it effectively ended on January 6th, 2021… [T]he way I look at it is that the Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating, companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.
This explains Meta’s pivot to, first, the metaverse, which failed, and, more recently, AI, which hasn’t yet, but will. It explains YouTube’s own doomed embrace of AI and its broader transition into a Netflix competitor, rather than a platform for true user-generated content. Same with Twitter’s willingness to sell to Elon Musk, Google’s enshittification, and, relatedly, Reddit’s recent stagnant googlification. After 2021, the major tech platforms we’ve relied on since the 2010s could no longer pretend that they would ever be able to properly manage the amount of users, the amount of content, the amount of influence they “need” to exist at the size they “need” to exist at to make the amount of money they “need” to exist.
And after sleepwalking through the Biden administration and doing the bare minimum to avoid any fingers pointed their direction about election interference last year, the companies are now fully giving up. Knowing the incoming Trump administration will not only not care, but will even reward them for it.
[…]
[I]t is also safe to assume that the majority of internet users right now — both ones too young to remember a pre-moderated internet and ones too normie to have used it at the time — do not actually understand what that is going to look and feel like. But I can tell you where this is all headed, though much of this is already happening.
Under Zuckerberg’s new “censorship”-free plan, Meta’s social networks will immediately fill up with hatred and harassment. Which will make a fertile ground for terrorism and extremism. Scams and spam will clog comments and direct messages. And illicit content, like non-consensual sexual material, will proliferate in private corners of networks like group messages and private Groups. Algorithms will mindlessly spread this slop, boosted by the loudest, dumbest, most reactionary users on the platform, helping it evolve and metastasize into darker, stickier social movements. And the network will effectively break down. But Meta is betting that the average user won’t care or notice. AI profiles will like their posts, comment on them, and even make content for them. A feedback loop of nonsense and violence. Our worst, unmoderated impulses, shared by algorithm and reaffirmed by AI. Where nothing has to be true and everything is popular. A world where if Meta does inspire conspiracy theories, race riots, or insurrections, no one will actually notice. Or, at the very least, be so divided on what happened that Meta doesn’t get blamed for it again.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: Hartono Creative Studio
“Do your own research” is the mantra of the conspiracy theorist. It turns out that if you search for evidence of something on the internet, you’ll find it. Want proof that the earth is flat? There’s plenty of nutjob articles, videos, and podcasts for that. As there is for almost anything you can possibly imagine.
This post by Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield focuses on the attack on the US Capitol four years ago for The Atlantic is based on this larger observation about the internet as a ‘justification machine’. As an historian, it makes me sad that when people refer to the “wider context” of a present-day event, they rarely go back more than a few months — or, at the most, a few years.
For example, I read a fantastic book on the history of Russia over the holiday period which really helped me understand the current invasion of Ukraine. I haven’t seen that mentioned once as part of the news cycle. It’s always on to the next thing, almost always presented through the partisan lens of some flavour of capitalism.
Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one. This dynamic plays into a natural tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them. Finding such information (or large groups of people who eagerly propagate it) has not always been so easy. Evidence foraging might historically have meant digging into a subject, testing arguments, or relying on genuine expertise. That was the foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built.
The current internet—a mature ecosystem with widespread access and ease of self-publishing—undoes that.
[…]
Conspiracy theorizing is a deeply ingrained human phenomenon, and January 6 is just one of many crucial moments in American history to get swept up in the paranoid style. But there is a marked difference between this insurrection (where people were presented with mountains of evidence about an event that played out on social media in real time) and, say, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (where the internet did not yet exist and people speculated about the event with relatively little information to go on). Or consider the 9/11 attacks: Some did embrace conspiracy theories similar to those that animated false-flag narratives of January 6. But the adoption of these conspiracy theories was aided not by the hyperspeed of social media but by the slower distribution of early online streaming sites, message boards, email, and torrenting; there were no centralized feeds for people to create and pull narratives from.
The justification machine, in other words, didn’t create this instinct, but it has made the process of erasing cognitive dissonance far more efficient. Our current, fractured media ecosystem works far faster and with less friction than past iterations, providing on-demand evidence for consumers that is more tailored than even the most frenzied cable news broadcasts can offer.
[…]
The justification machine thrives on the breakneck pace of our information environment; the machine is powered by the constant arrival of more news, more evidence. There’s no need to reorganize, reassess. The result is a stuckness, a feeling of being trapped in an eternal present tense.
Source: The Atlantic
Image: British Library
I like this post by Adam Singer as it builds on my last post about increasing one’s serendipity surface, as well as an article I published over a decade ago entitled curate or be curated. The latter covered some of the same ground as Singer’s post, riffing on the idea of the ‘filter bubble’.
Algorithms are literally everywhere in our lives these days, and coupled with AI we are likely to live templated lives. I’m currently composing this post while listening to music coming out of a speaker driven by the iPod I built a couple of years ago. I’m reading a book that I found in a second-hand bookstore. I hesitate to use the word ‘resistance’ but these are small ways in which I ensure that my world isn’t dictated by someone else’s choices for me.
We’ve never had more freedom, more choices. But in reality, most people are subtly funneled into the same streams, the same pools of ‘socially approved’ culture, cuisine and ideas. Remixes and memes abound, but almost no one shares anything weird, original or different. People wake up, perhaps with ambitions to make unique choices they believe are their own, only to find that the options have been filtered, curated, and ‘tailored to existing tastes’ by algorithms that claim to know them best. This only happens as these algorithms prioritize popularity or even just safe choices over individuality. They don’t lead you down our own path or really care what’s interesting and unknown, they lead us down paths proven profitable, efficient, safe. If you work in a creative sector (and many of us do) you already know how dangerous this is professionally, not to mention spiritually.
Algorithms might make for comfortable consumers, but they cannot produce thoughtful creators, and they are slowly taking your ability to choose from you. You might think you’re choosing, but you never really are. When your ideas, interests, and even daily meals are largely inspired by whatever was already approved, already done, already voted on and liked, you’re only experiencing life as an echo of the masses (or the machines, if personalized based on historic preference). And in this echo chamber, genuine discovery is rare, even radical.
Of course, it’s very easy to live like this, as we live in a society totally biased to pain avoidance and ease (it’s so ingrained much of the medical establishment only treats symptoms, not causes). There’s a an unconscious allure in this conformity, a feeling of belonging, of social safety, it’s a warm blanket you aren’t alone in the cosmos. But at what cost? In blending into the mainstream wasteland, you risk losing something deeply human: your impulse to explore, the courage to confront the unfamiliar, the potential to define yourself on your own terms. You don’t get real creativity without courage, and no one has this until they stop looking to the crowd for consensus approval.
Source: Hot Takes
Image: Google Deepmind
Back in 2016 I coined the term ‘serendipity surface’ which I defined as the inverse of an ‘attack surface’ when building software. In other words, you want to maximise your serendipity surface so that good and unexpected things happen to you. It’s something I discussed on the Artificiality podcast last year if you want to hear me discuss it further.
Tim Klapdor talks of a ‘serendipity engine’ and I guess Thought Shrapnel could be considered that for me. As part of my reading for this eclectic blog and newsletter, I came across this post on the Model Thinkers website on ‘The Surface Area of Luck’ which has no date, but was indexed by The Internet Archive for the first time in 2021.
There’s some good, actionable advice in it, as well as links for further exploration. It also includes the above image and, as we know, all good ideas require an image :)
Luck, by definition, is about chance, but it’s not totally out of your control. So why not use this model to increase your chance of luck?
The Surface Area of Luck, or your chance of being lucky, is equivalent to the action you take towards your passion, multiplied by the number of people you effectively communicate your passion and activities to.
Put simply: Luck = (Passionate) Doing x (Effective) Telling.
Source: Model Thinkers
This is a fantastic long post from Simon Willison about things we learned about Large Language Models (LLMs) in 2024. The bit that jumped out to me was, unsurprisingly, the AI literacies angle to all this. As Willison points out, using an LLM such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini seems straightforward as it’s a chat-based interface, but even with the voice modes there’s still a need to understand what’s going on under the hood.
People often want ‘training’ on new technologies, but it’s actually quite difficult to provide in this situation. While I think there are underlying literacies involved here, a key way of understanding what’s going on is to experiment. As with every other technology, there’s no substitute for messing about with stuff to see how it works — and where the limits are.
I’d recommend also having a look at Willison’s list of ‘artifacts’ he created using Claude in a single week. It’s also worth considering the analogy he makes with building out railway infrastructure in the 19th century, as it kind of works.
A drum I’ve been banging for a while is that LLMs are power-user tools—they’re chainsaws disguised as kitchen knives. They look deceptively simple to use—how hard can it be to type messages to a chatbot?—but in reality you need a huge depth of both understanding and experience to make the most of them and avoid their many pitfalls.
If anything, this problem got worse in 2024.
We’ve built computer systems you can talk to in human language, that will answer your questions and usually get them right! … depending on the question, and how you ask it, and whether it’s accurately reflected in the undocumented and secret training set.
[…]
What are we doing about this? Not much. Most users are thrown in at the deep end. The default LLM chat UI is like taking brand new computer users, dropping them into a Linux terminal and expecting them to figure it all out.
Meanwhile, it’s increasingly common for end users to develop wildly inaccurate mental models of how these things work and what they are capable of. I’ve seen so many examples of people trying to win an argument with a screenshot from ChatGPT—an inherently ludicrous proposition, given the inherent unreliability of these models crossed with the fact that you can get them to say anything if you prompt them right.
There’s a flipside to this too: a lot of better informed people have sworn off LLMs entirely because they can’t see how anyone could benefit from a tool with so many flaws. The key skill in getting the most out of LLMs is learning to work with tech that is both inherently unreliable and incredibly powerful at the same time. This is a decidedly non-obvious skill to acquire!
There is so much space for helpful education content here, but we need to do do a lot better than outsourcing it all to AI grifters with bombastic Twitter threads.
Source: Simon Willison’s Weblog
Image: Bernd Dittrich
My three-week breaks each year, usually in Spring, Summer, and Winter, are rejuvenating. One of the things I most enjoy about them is that I give myself permission to come off social media for a bit. While I’m not a user of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or the like, even Mastodon or Bluesky can be an easy thing to reach for instead of doing something more interesting or useful.
There is no narrative to a social media feed. It’s just one thing after another, ordered either chronologically or algorithmically. Either isn’t great for trying to build a coherent picture of the world, especially given how emotionally-charged social media posts can be. As a former Nuzzel user, I’ve found Sill useful for avoiding FOMO. It creates a digest of the most popular links that your network is sharing, which is pretty useful.
What I’ve found myself leaning more into recently is experts making sense of the world as it happens. Two good examples of this are The Rest is Politics and The Athletic which make sense of the world of politics and football (soccer), respectively. Whether or not I agree with what the podcast host or article writer is saying, engaging with longer-form content provides much better context and helps me figure out what I think about a given situation.
Sometimes, of course, it’s OK not to have an opinion on something. This is not always understood or valued on social networks.
A 2023 study… [showed] how internet addiction causes structural changes in the brain that influence behavior and cognitive abilities. Michoel Moshel, a researcher at Macquarie University and co-author of the study, explains that compulsive content consumption — popularly known as doomscrolling — “takes advantage of our brain’s natural tendency to seek out new things, especially when it comes to potentially harmful or alarming information, a trait that once helped us survive.”
[…]
The problem, says the researcher, is that social media users are constantly exposed to rapidly changing and variable stimuli — such as Instagram notifications, WhatsApp messages, or news alerts — that have addictive potential. This means users are constantly switching their focus, which undermines their ability to concentrate effectively.
[…]
In December, psychologist Carlos Losada offered advice to EL PAÍS on how to avoid falling into the trap of doomscrolling — or, in other words, being consumed by the endless cycle of junk content amplified by algorithms. His recommendations included recognizing the problem, making a conscious effort to disconnect, and engaging in activities that require physical presence, such as meeting friends or playing sports.
Source: EL PAÍS
Image: Kelly Sikkema
Recently, when I met up with someone who was launching a new council website, they casually mentioned that his team had optimised it for a reading age of nine. This, apparently, is the average reading age of the UK adult population. A few years ago, my brother-in-law, who works for a church, showed me the way that they had started providing church updates in video format. YouTube and TikTok are by far the most-used apps by (western) teenagers.
Are we heading towards a post-literate society? This article by Sarah O’Connor quotes Neil Postman but I think it would be more appropriate to cite Walter Ong on secondary orality, a kind of orality that depends on literate culture and the existence of writing. For example, the updates provided by my brother-in-law’s church depend on there being a script, written updates to share with the congregation, and a programme of events to which they can refer.
Technological shifts reshape how we perceive and process information, and — as I mentioned in a recent post — we live in a world which privileges immediate, emotionally-charged, image-driven communication over slower, deliberate reflections. It’s a difficult thing to resist or change, because like fast-food it’s something which appeals to something innate.
(In passing, I would point out that the literacy proficiency of 16-24 year olds in England is probably due to the introduction of a phonics-based approach in early years, and ensuring young people remain in education or training up to the age of 18)
The implications for politics and the quality of public debate are already evident. These, too, were foreseen. In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote an article called Twilight of the Books in the New Yorker magazine about what a possible post-literate culture might look like. In oral cultures, he wrote, cliche and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are prized because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for”. Does that sound familiar?
[…]
These trends are not unavoidable or irreversible. Finland demonstrates the potential for high-quality education and strong social norms to sustain a highly literate population, even in a world where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that improved schooling can make: there, the literacy proficiency of 16-24 year olds was significantly better than a decade ago.
The question of whether AI could alleviate or exacerbate the problem is more tricky. Systems like ChatGPT can perform well on many reading and writing tasks: they can parse reams of information and reduce it to summaries.
[…]
But, as [David] Autor [an economics professor at MIT] says, in order to make good use of a tool to “level up” your skills, you need a decent foundation to begin with. Absent that, [Andreas] Schleicher [director for education and skills at the OECD] worries that people with poor literacy skills will become “naive consumers of prefabricated content”.
Source: The Financial Times
Image: Rachit Tank
Just before Christmas, I headed up to Barter Books with my family. It’s a great place where you can exchange books you no longer need for credit, which you can then spend on books that other people have brought in. I picked up Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East, a big thick history book by former BBC correspondent, Martin Sixsmith.
I finished it this morning; it was a fantastic read. Sixsmith serialised the book on BBC Radio 4 so it’s easier to follow than the usual history book, but still has plenty of Russian names and places for the reader to wrap their head around.
As Audrey Watters notes, reading can often be hard work. It’s tempting to want to read the summary, to optimise your information environment such that you can get on with the important stuff. Where “the important stuff” is, presumably, making money, arguing on the internet, or attempting to turn a lack of empathy for others into a virtue.
Appropriately enough, it’s difficult to adequately summarise Audrey’s argument in this post because it’s nuanced — as the best writing usually is. As she points out, an important part of reading widely is developing empathy. For example, while I still hold a very low opinion of Vladimir Putin, make a lot more sense when put in the context of a 1,000 year narrative arc. It would have been difficult to come to that realisation watching a short YouTube video or social media thread.
Reading can be slow. It can be quite challenging work – and not simply because our attention has been increasingly conditioned, fragmented with distractions and disruptions. And yet from the considered effort of reading comes consideration. So it isn’t simply that we no longer read at length or read deeply; we no longer value contemplation.
[…]
If, as some scholars argue, learning to read does not just build cognition but helps develop empathy – that is, young readers become immersed in stories outside their own experience and thus see the world differently – what are the implications when adults cannot bother to tell stories to their children?
Source: Second Breakfast
Image: Matias North
In his most recent newsletter, Ben James shared some “important snippets” from things that he read over the holidays. It included a post from 2019 on ‘The Hamming Question’ which I really like, and focuses the mind somewhat. I perhaps need to think about what the Hamming questions are in the areas in which I work.
Mathematician Richard Hamming used to ask scientists in other fields “What are the most important problems in your field?” partly so he could troll them by asking “Why aren’t you working on them?” and partly because getting asked this question is really useful for focusing people’s attention on what matters.
Source: LessWrong
Well, here we are at the end of another year! My sole criterion for inclusion in this ‘best of’ list is that the articles I reference made me think. Reinforcing my existing views, or being merely ‘interesting’ wasn’t enough to make it. So, after whittling down from twenty or so, here are my top ten Thought Shrapnel posts of 2024:
Thanks for reading and sharing Thought Shrapnel this year! I’ll be back in 2025 🎉
In 2009, seeing which way the wind was blowing, I decided to sell my CD collection and use the proceeds to fund streaming my music via Spotify. Fifteen years later, factoring in price rises and an upgrade to the family version, I’ve probably spent about £2,000. So I reckon I’m about even.
I’ve really enjoyed using Spotify. I like the way it’s available everywhere, including on my Google Home devices and in my car. It’s learned my tastes and I’ve discovered all kinds of music through the service.
However, I’ve felt increasingly guilty about the way that Spotify, and other music streaming services, treat artists. We’re now in a situation where artists have to tour to make a living. I’m not sure that’s necessarily healthy.
Also, given Sabrina Carpenter seems to show up on every playlist I ask Spotify to create at the moment (including ‘hardcore gym rap’!) I’m pretty sure they are also making a lot of money from paid placements. My unease is only compounded with the revelations in this article which details the ways that Spotify have actively tried to reduce the amount of royalties paid to artists.
Perhaps it’s time to move on. Perhaps the answer is to go back to MP3s and use a platform such as Bandcamp? 🤔
According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.
After at least a year of piloting, PFC was presented to Spotify editors in 2017 as one of the company’s new bets to achieve profitability. According to a former employee, just a few months later, a new column appeared on the dashboard editors used to monitor internal playlists. The dashboard was where editors could view various stats: plays, likes, skip rates, saves. And now, right at the top of the page, editors could see how successfully each playlist embraced “music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins,” as PFC was described internally.
[…]
Some employees felt that those responsible for pushing the PFC strategy did not understand the musical traditions that were being affected by it. These higher-ups were well versed in the business of major-label hitmaking, but not necessarily in the cultures or histories of genres like jazz, classical, ambient, and lo-fi hip-hop—music that tended to do well on playlists for relaxing, sleeping, or focusing. One of my sources told me that the attitude was “if the metrics went up, then let’s just keep replacing more and more, because if the user doesn’t notice, then it’s fine.”
[…]
In a Slack channel dedicated to discussing the ethics of streaming, Spotify’s own employees debated the fairness of the PFC program. “I wonder how much these plays ‘steal’ from actual ’normal’ artists,” one employee asked. And yet as far as the public was concerned, the company had gone to great lengths to keep the initiative under wraps. Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living. Or perhaps the company was aware that this project to cheapen music contradicted so many of the ideals upon which its brand had been built. Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery—and who was going to get excited about “discovering” a bunch of stock music? Artists had been sold the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy—that the best would rise to the top because users voted by listening. But the PFC program undermined all this. PFC was not the only way in which Spotify deliberately and covertly manipulated programming to favor content that improved its margins, but it was the most immediately galling. Nor was the problem simply a matter of “authenticity” in music. It was a matter of survival for actual artists, of musicians having the ability to earn a living on one of the largest platforms for music. PFC was irrefutable proof that Spotify rigged its system against musicians who knew their worth.
Source: Harper’s Magazine
About a quarter of the British working age population (ages 16-64) does not have a job. There are many reasons for this, but the right-wing view on this is that “benefits are too generous.” I think we can put bed with this chart from the University of Bath (2019):
Reducing benefits that are already some of the lowest in the developed world isn’t likely to get people working again, it just causes misery and has knock-on effects such as an increase in the amount of shoplifting for food and other essential items.
Not only are British unemployment benefits low, but they’re also split in a way which is massively skewed towards housing benefit, as even commentators in the right-wing Sunday Times have to admit:
Unsurprisingly, state-level economics is fiendishly difficult and nothing at all like running household finances. Here’s a very simple system diagram from an article in the journal Social Policy & Administration from earlier this year which discusses 24 European countries and macroeconomic variables:
There are two things that it seems the British political class don’t want to talk about. The first is Brexit, an act of almost unimaginable economic harm that has meant 15% lower trade with the EU, and cost the economy over £140 billion so far. The second is the long-term health impact of the pandemic, with the related effects on the number of people working.
All in all, we need a grown-up conversation about this, based on data. But with Reform UK waiting in the wings, potentially financed by the world’s richest person, the chances are we’ll continue with knee-jerk reactions and shallow thinking for the foreseeable future.
Having a moral compass can sometimes make life more difficult. I literally turned down a ridiculously well-paid gig last month because it contravened my ethical code. While that particular example was relatively clear cut, it’s more difficult when it comes to things like platforms which are used for free. At what point does your use of it become out of alignment with your values?
Twitter turning to X is a good example of this, with some people leaving a long time ago (🙋) while others, for some inexplicable reason, are still on there. I’d argue that the next service to be recognised as toxic is probably going to be Substack. I hosted Thought Shrapnel there briefly for a few weeks at the end of last year, but left when they started platforming Nazis. They seem to be at it again (here’s an archive version as that link was down at the time of writing).
While I wanted to give that context, this post is actually about a particular style of writing that is popular on Substack. I discovered this via Robin Sloan’s newsletter, which (thankfully) is written in a style at odds with the opposite of the advice given by Max Read, a relatively-successful Substacker. What Read says about being a “textual YouTuber” is spot-on. I can’t imagine anything more awful than watching video after video, but I will read and read until the proverbial cows come home.
The other thing which I think Read gets right is something I was discussing the other day (IRL I’m afraid, no link!) about how everyone wants Strong Opinions™ these days and to be the “main character.” My own writing these days is almost the opposite of that: slightly philosophical, with provisional opinions and, while introspective, not presenting myself as the hero of the story.
My standard joke about my job is that I am less a “writer” than I am a “textual YouTuber for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” What I mean by this is that while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one exception being: Weekly op-ed columnist.) What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing–or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept–and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of “thinking through,” to which subscribers are invited. This means you have to be pretty comfortable having a strong voice, offering relatively strong opinions, and just generally “being the main character” in your writing. And, indeed, all these qualities are more important than any kind of particular technical writing skill: Many of the world’s best (formal) writers are not comfortable with any of those things, while many of the world’s worst writers are extremely comfortable with them.
So, part of your job as a Substacker is is “producing words” and part of your job is “cultivating a persona for which people might have some kind of inexplicable affection or even respect.”
Source: Read Max
Image: Steve Johnson
I had a great walk and talk with my good friend Bryan Mathers yesterday. He made the trip up from London to Northumberland, where I live, and we went walking in the Simonside Hills and at Druridge Bay.
One of our many topics of conversation was the various seasons of life, including our kids leaving home, doing meaningful work, and social interaction.
Our generation is perhaps the first where men getting help through therapy is at least semi-normal, where it’s OK to talk about feelings, and where there’s the beginnings of an understanding that perhaps work shouldn’t define a man’s life.
What’s interesting about this article in The Guardian by Adrienne Matei is the framing as a “clash of identity and ability.” I’m already experiencing this on a physical level with my mind thinking I’m capable of running, swimming, and jumping much further than I’m able. It’s frustrating, but as the article points out, a nudge that I need to be thinking about my life differently as I approach 44 years old.
In 2023, researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Alabama at Birmingham published a study exploring how hegemonic masculinity affects men’s approach to health and ageing. “Masculine identity upholds beliefs about masculine enactment,” the authors write, referring to the traits some men feel they must exhibit, including control, responsibility, strength and competitiveness. As men age, they are likely to feel pressure to remain self-reliant and avoid perceived weakness, including seeking medical help or acknowledging emerging challenges.
The study’s authors write that middle-aged men might try to fight ageing with disciplined health and fitness routines. But as they get older and those strategies become less successful, they have to rethink what it means to be “masculine”, or suffer poorer health outcomes. Accepting these identity shifts can be particularly difficult for men, who can exhibit less self-reflection and self-compassion than women.
[…]
[Dr Karen Skerrett, a psychotherapist and researcher] emphasizes there is no tidy, one size fits all way to navigate the clash of identity and ability: “There is just so much diversity that we can’t particularly predict how somebody is going to react to limitations,” she says.
However, in a 2021 research report she and her co-authors proposed six tasks to help people develop a “realistic, accommodating and hopeful” perception of the future: acknowledging and accepting the realities of ageing; normalizing angst about the future; active reminiscence; accommodating physical, cognitive and social changes; searching for new emotionally meaningful goals; and expanding one’s capacity to tolerate ambiguity. These tasks help people to recharacterize ageing as a transition that requires adaptability, growth and foresight, and to resist “premature foreclosure”, or the notion that their life stories have ended.
As we age, managing our own egos becomes a bigger psychological task, says Skerrett. We may not be able to do all the things we once enjoyed, but we can still ask ourselves how we can contribute and support others in meaningful ways. Focusing on internal growth and confronting hard truths with grace and clarity can ease confusion, shame and anger. Instead of clinging to lost identities, we can seek purpose in connection, legacy and gratitude.
Source: The Guardian
After reading that “every parent should watch” a Channel 4 TV programme called Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones I dutifully did so this afternoon. I’m off work, so need something to do after wrapping presents 😉
I thought it was poor, if I’m honest. As a former teacher and senior leader, and the father of two teenagers (one who has a real issue with screen time) I thought it was OK-ish as a conversation starter. But the blunt instrument of a ‘ban’, as is apparently going to happen in Australia, just seems a bit laughable to be honest. How are you supposed to develop digital literacies through non-use?
It’s easy to think that a problem you and other people are experiencing should be solved quickly and easily by someone else. In this case, the government. But this is a systemic issue, and not as easy as the government ‘forcing’ tech platforms to do something about it. What about the chronic underfunding of youth activities and child mental health services, and the slashing of council budgets? Smartphones aren’t the only reason kids sit in their rooms.
In March 2025, the Online Safety Act comes into force. The intention is welcome, but as with the Australian ‘ban’ it’s probably going to be hard to make it work.
The kids in the TV experiment were 12 years old. If, at the end of 2024, you’re letting your not-even-teenager on a smartphone without any safeguards, I’m afraid you’re doing it wrong. If you’re allowing kids of that age to have their phones in their bedroom overnight, you’re doing it wrong. That’s not something you need a ban to fix.
Smartphones, just like any technology, aren’t wholly positive or wholly negative. There are huge benefits and significant drawbacks to them. What’s more powerful in this situation are social norms. If this programme helps to start a conversation, then it’s done its job. I’m just concern that most people are going to take from it the message that “the government needs to sort this out.”
Source: Channel 4
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are now an integral part of my workflow. This is true of almost everything I produce these days, including this post (I used this tool to create the image alt text).
I use genAI in client work, and also in my academic studies. It’s incredibly useful as a kind of ‘thought partner’ and particularly handy in doing a RAG analysis of essays in relation to assignments. Do I use it to fabricate the answers to assessed questions which I then submit as my own work? No, of course not.
This article in The Guardian reports from the frontlines of the struggle in universities for academic rigour and against cheating. Different institutions are approaching the issue differently, as you would expect. The answer, I would suggest, is something akin to Cambridge University’s AI-positive approach, outlined in the quoted text below.
The whole point of Higher Education is to allow students to reflect on themselves and the world. It’s been my experience that using genAI in appropriate ways is an incredibly enriching experience. Especially given that my Systems Thinking modules focus on me as a practitioner in relation to a specific situation in my life, what would it even mean to “cheat”?
I was notified this morning that I received a distinction for my latest module, as I did for the one before it. Would I have achieved those grades without using genAI? Maybe. Probably, even, given I’ve already got a doctorate. But the experience for me as a distance learner was so much better than being limited to interactions with my (excellent) tutor and fellow students in the online forum.
At the end of the day, I’m studying for my own benefit, and I know that studying with genAI is better than studying without it. I’m very much looking forward to using Google’s latest upgrade to Gemini Live for my next module, which I found recently to be very useful to conversationally prepare for interviews!
More than half of students now use generative AI to help with their assessments, according to a survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute, and about 5% of students admit using it to cheat. In November, Times Higher Education reported that, despite “patchy record keeping”, cases appeared to be soaring at Russell Group universities, some of which had reported a 15-fold increase in cheating. But confusion over how these tools should be used – if at all – has sown suspicion in institutions designed to be built on trust. Some believe that AI stands to revolutionise how people learn for the better, like a 24/7 personal tutor – Professor HAL, if you like. To others, it is an existential threat to the entire system of learning – a “plague upon education” as one op-ed for Inside Higher Ed put it – that stands to demolish the process of academic inquiry.
In the struggle to stuff the genie back in the bottle, universities have become locked in an escalating technological arms race, even turning to AI themselves to try to catch misconduct. Tutors are turning on students, students on each other and hardworking learners are being caught by the flak. It’s left many feeling pessimistic about the future of higher education. But is ChatGPT really the problem universities need to grapple with? Or is it something deeper?
[…]
What counts as cheating is determined, ultimately, by institutions and examiners. Many universities are already adapting their approach to assessment, penning “AI-positive” policies. At Cambridge University, for example, appropriate use of generative AI includes using it for an “overview of new concepts”, “as a collaborative coach”, or “supporting time management”. The university warns against over-reliance on these tools, which could limit a student’s ability to develop critical thinking skills. Some lecturers I spoke to said they felt that this sort of approach was helpful, but others said it was capitulating. One conveyed frustration that her university didn’t seem to be taking academic misconduct seriously any more; she had received a “whispered warning” that she was no longer to refer cases where AI was suspected to the central disciplinary board.
If anything, the AI cheating crisis has exposed how transactional the process of gaining a degree has become. Higher education is increasingly marketised; universities are cash-strapped, chasing customers at the expense of quality learning. Students, meanwhile, are labouring under financial pressures of their own, painfully aware that secure graduate careers are increasingly scarce. Just as the rise of essay mills coincided with the rapid expansion of higher education in the noughties, ChatGPT has struck at a time when a degree feels more devalued than ever.
Source: The Guardian
Most people probably have a favourite weather app. Mine is the oddly-named Weawow, for three reasons. First, it looks good; second, it allows you to choose the data source for weather forecasts; third, it shows sunrise, sunset, and ‘golden hour’ times in a really handy way.
I stumbled across a website today from Éibhear Ó hAnluain, a software engineer who lives in Dublin. Where I live is within 2 degrees latitude of there, so the timings are approximately correct for my location too. If someone knows a quick and easy way of generating a similar page for anywhere in the world, let me know!
Source: Éibhear/Gibiris
I notice that Ev Williams, founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, has co-founded a new social app called Mozi. It’s iOS-only for now, and seems to be reinventing some of the functionality of Foursquare check-ins with the private aspect of Path.
Path is the best social network I’ve ever used. I only used it with my family, but as I mentioned when lamenting its demise in 2018, it had the perfect mix of features. As I also hinted at in that post, for-profit private social networks just aren’t sustainable. We never did find anything to replace it, and Signal chats just aren’t the same.
Mozi seems to be based on people making travel plans and then serendipitously bumping into each other. I’d suggest this is already a solved problem for younger generations through Snap Maps, meaning it’s a firmly middle-aged problem. For that demographic, they’re probably likely to be travelling less. And if they’re British, a good proportion would pay money not to awkwardly bump into people they kind-of know 😅
Williams is a billionaire at this point, so he can do what he likes. But, inevitably, I’ll be pointing back to this post in less than two years when it shuts down. So I won’t be bothering to set up an account, even when it comes to Android.
When you spend your life building internet platforms, it’s hard to quit the habit. So while trying to get a grasp on the people I knew to invite to my birthday, I started thinking: What if we did have a network designed for this purpose? Not just invites, but a map of the people we actually knew and tools for enhancing those relationships?
In other words, what would an actually social network look like?
Clearly, it would need to be private. Non-performative. No public profiles. No public status competitions. No follower counts. No strangers.
Source: Medium
I used to be all about the life hacking when I was younger: optimising my time and ensuring maximum productivity was my goal. It made sense for that period of my life, as when I was in my twenties I was teaching full-time, pursuing a doctorate, and starting a family. Time seemed in short supply.
It wasn’t just me, though. There was very much what seemed a movement around this. Yes, it was mainly younger white men, but I admit to not realising that was the case at the time. This article by Laura Miller reflects on that time through the lens of a new book entitled Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents. Ultimately, was it just about young men finding ways to do things that their mothers used to do for them? 🤔
The notion of hacking “life” arose during a period when technology was achieving one minor marvel after another, and “disruption” could still be touted as an unalloyed good. Yes, a tech bubble had burst at the beginning of the decade, but that was viewed as a failure of business models, not the tech itself… Smartphones seemed almost magical in their ability to iron the hassles and uncertainty out of everyday activities. You no longer had to give people directions to your house, rustle up a newspaper to find out where the movie you wanted to see was playing, or pick a restaurant with no idea what other diners thought about it.
[…]
As you’ve surely realized by now, it is possible to devote so much time to organizing your work that you never actually do any of it. As Reagle observes, several of the early champions of life hacking, include O’Brien and Mann, signed contracts to write books about how to defeat procrastination and attain Inbox Zero and then never got around to writing them. Most of them dropped out of the scene entirely, abandoning their blogs and denouncing the tech world’s preoccupation with productivity.
Others became proponents of minimalism, an ethos that involves getting rid of almost all of your stuff while becoming even more obsessed with the few things you keep. They sold their houses and moved into RVs. Like Marie Kondo on overdrive, they aimed to fit everything they owned into a single backpack.
[…]
Of course, plenty of people live in RVs and don’t own much because they have no other option; nobody asks them to give TED talks about it. Reagle points out that minimalism has been a phenomenon of young, educated, affluent white men supposedly repudiating a middle-class materialism made possible by their careers in the tech industry and lack of family encumbrances. “Minimalism is for well-off bachelors,” as Reagle puts it, and not especially imaginative ones at that. If you make your fortune at 30 and you’re the sort of person who’s never given much thought to a purpose beyond “success,” what do you do with yourself? A common and strikingly unimaginative answer among minimalists was full-time travel. The possibility that experiences can be accumulated and consumed in just as mindless a fashion as belongings can did not occur to them.
[…]
As one anonymous wag has observed, the vast resources of Silicon Valley have too often been applied to the problem of “what is my mother no longer doing for me?” Don’t get me wrong: I remain in the market for solid, practical tips. But life, like a palm tree or any other organic thing, can only take so much hacking before it collapses.
Source: Slate
Last week, I shared a post from this same website, an ‘advent calendar’ of blogging where people reflect what they’ve thought a lot about over the last year.
This entry is about comfort zones and systems change. The author makes their living in ‘systems change’ and points out that it’s natural for things to evolve and change over time. Not to allow this to happen privileges the few over the many. It’s a good way of thinking about it.
I’ve included an image that Bryan Mathers made for our co-op last year to illustrate my anti-establishment tendencies. I’m almost embarrassed for other people when they use the phrase “My boss said…” as if it’s a normal thing. Any hierarchies should be fluid and temporary.
On the surface, it can seem like people’s resistance to making things better is down to their fear of the unknown, and they lean into the idea of ‘better the devil you know’. However, I’m eight years into this gig, and actually, what I’ve observed is that it’s the complexity that comes with imagining the world anew that people don’t like.
[…]
They find it destabilising when new ways of being emerge because – in order to adopt them – it would mean straying from a well-trodden route. New ideas threaten to force people to create new pathways, adapting to unfamiliar scenarios as they go.
The reality, though, is that this is how life works. We can manufacture fixed systems that seek to impose rigid structures – for example, hierarchies, competition and individualism have all been created. But, at its core, the world shifts and alters and adapts. You only have to look at the natural world to see how life constantly evolves, or the universe to recognise we’re constantly expanding.
By resisting change, we are upholding the manufactured systems that we are forced to live within. The same systems that are rigged against us.
Because those systems are familiar. They are societal norms. They are known.
As long as we are resistant to change, we allow power to be consolidated in the hands of a dominant few who get to shape the media, government and organisations which prescribe how we live our lives.
Source: I thought about that a lot
Image: CC BY-NC Visual Thinkery for WAO
I’m not sure if this post by Ryan Holiday is just a form of (not-so) subtle marketing for his ‘Anxiety Medallion’ but he nevertheless makes some good points. Framing anxiety as his “most expensive habit,” Holiday talks about what anxiety “steals” from us.
Without wanting to wade too much into the nature vs nurture debate, I think it’s clear that genetics provides some kind of baseline level here. For me, that’s both incredibly frustrating (you can’t choose your ancestors!) but also somewhat liberating. I can’t remember where I learned to do so, but over the last 18 months or so I’ve started saying to myself “it’s all just chemicals in my brain.”
It doesn’t always work, of course, but along with good exercise and sleep routines — and ensuring my stress levels remain low — I manage to cope with it all. The hardest thing to explain to people is that anxiety doesn’t have to have an object. Existential angst, for example, isn’t just something that 19th century philosophers suffered from, but regular people in the here and now.
It’s not flashy, it’s not thrilling, and it doesn’t even provide the fleeting pleasures that other vices might. And yet, anxiety is a vice. A habit. A relentless one that eats away at your time, your relationships, and your moments of joy.
[…]
Seneca tells us we suffer more in imagination than in reality. Anxiety turns the hypothetical into the actual. It drags us into a future that doesn’t yet exist and forces us to live out every worst-case scenario in vivid detail. The cost isn’t just mental. It’s physical. It’s emotional. It’s relational.
[…]
Anxiety is expensive—not just in terms of the mental toll, but in the way it costs us our lives. Every minute spent consumed by worry is a minute lost.
Source: Ryan Holiday
Image: Nik
I listen to a popular podcast called The Rest is Politics. I remember listening before the US Presidential Election where the hosts could not bring themselves to believe that Trump would successfully win a second term. Why? Because he has “no ground game.” That is to say, he doesn’t have the processes set up to be able to mass-mobilise supporters to knock on doors, get the word out, and encourage people to vote.
Given the results, that’s increasingly looking like 20th century thinking. I’ve heard anecodotes of people knocking on doors and people already having talking points from following social media influencers and watching YouTube videos. If people have already made up their mind based on things they’ve seen on the small screen they carry around with them everywhere, knocking on their door every few years isn’t going to change their mind.
This is why social media is so important. This post argues that we need to be creating new spaces, not just “meeting people where they are.” It’s not an incorrect position to take. I don’t disagree with anything in the post. But how exactly? Mastodon and the Fediverse more generally could have been the ‘ark’ to which people fled after leaving X/Twitter. Instead, they flocked to another “potentially decentralised” social network, with investors and no incentive to do anything other than what everyone else has done before.
I’d like to organise. I’d like to use Open Source software everywhere. I’d like to only buy things from co-ops. However, back in the real world where I need to interact with capitalism to survive…
It’s hard to ignore the fact that progressive movements, despite their critical rhetoric, rely on the same capitalist and surveillance-driven platforms that actively subvert their goals. Platforms like Google, Facebook, The Communication Silo Formerly Named Twitter, and Instagram—behemoths of surveillance capitalism—become the very spaces where activism happens. These corporations profit from our clicks, likes, and shares, capturing our data and feeding it into systems of control that profit from inequality, exploitation, and surveillance.
This ongoing reliance on corporate-owned platforms represents a deep contradiction in our movements. By using these tools, we are feeding the beast—the tech giants profiting from our data, monetizing our activism, and undermining the very causes we fight for. In a real sense, we’ve become complicit in our own subjugation, ceding our autonomy, values, and privacy to the very corporations that reinforce the inequalities we seek to dismantle.
[…]
The phrase “you have to meet people where they live” has been an all-too-convenient defense for this complicity. But this outlook only reinforces the status quo. Shouldn’t a genuinely radical movement—especially a socialist one—work toward building new spaces where people can live, organize, and act outside of these exploitative systems?
Socialist movements throughout history didn’t merely meet people in existing power structures—they created new models of organization, new forms of cooperation, and new spaces for living and working together. From cooperatives to unions, the goal has always been to build alternatives to the capitalist way of life. Why, then, should we treat digital space any differently?
[…]
We cannot keep organizing through the tools of surveillance capitalism if we want to build a post-capitalist future. We must take control of the infrastructure itself—through open-source, community-run platforms. This is not just about technical solutions, but about aligning our methods of organizing with our values and principles.
Source: Seize the Means of Community
Image: Intricate Explorer
I discovered this article via Laura who referenced it during our co-working session as we updated AILiteracy.fyi. As a fellow Garbage Day subscriber, she’d assumed I’d already seen it mentioned in that newsletter. I hadn’t.
What I like about this piece from Casey Newton is how he points out how disingenuous much of anti-AI sentiment is. There are people doing important, nuanced work pointing out the bullshit (hi, Audrey) but there’s also some really ill-informed, clickbaity stuff that reinforces prejudice.
Of course people will use generative AI to cheat. Of course they will use it to create awful things. But what’s new there? A lot of the hand-wringing I see is from people who have evidently never used an LLM for more than five seconds. They would have been the same people warning about the “dangers” of the internet in the late 90s because “anyone can create a website and put anything online!”
The thing is, while we can’t guarantee that any individual response from a chatbot will be honest or helpful, it’s inarguable that they are much more honest and more helpful today than they were two years ago. It’s also inarguable that hundreds of millions of people are already using them, and that millions are paying to use them.
The truth is that there are no guarantees in tech. Does Google guarantee that its search engine is honest, helpful, and harmless? Does X guarantee that its posts are? Does Facebook guarantee that its network is?
Most people know these systems are flawed, and adjust their expectations and usage accordingly. The “AI is fake and sucks” crowd is hyper-fixated on the things it can’t do — count the number of r’s in strawberry, figure out that the Onion was joking when it told us to eat rocks — and weirdly uninterested in the things it can.
[…]
Ultimately, both the “fake and sucks” and “real and dangerous” crowds agree that AI could go really, really badly. To stop that from happening though, the “fake and sucks” crowd needs to accept that AI is already more capable and more embedded in our systems than they currently admit. And while it’s fine to wish that the scaling laws do break, and give us all more time to adapt to what AI will bring, all of us would do well to spend some time planning for a world where they don’t.
Source: Platformer
This advent series is published anonymously, but Matt Jukes outed himself as the author of this one. It makes sense him doing so, as it’s about working in the open, and how it’s benefited him — but now he feels like it’s time to “shut up.” For what it’s worth, I hope he doesn’t.
I’m sharing it here, though, as there are plenty of people who I know who share as openly as Jukesie, and who might be thinking about different seasons to their careers. I suppose I’m one of them. My wife has never been comfortable about my ‘oversharing’, especially in the early days of Twitter. That’s why I’ve toned down that aspect a bit over the years
There’s something about oversharing that feels like a focus on the self. But, as I was explaining to my daughter in relation to art just yesterday, you have to find the thing that allows you to represent yourself in the world. For me, it’s writing. For others it’s drawing, painting, or singing. Without that, it’s a sad, unexpressed life.
(It’s also well worth looking at the other essays in the series, as there’s some really good writing here.)
People I’ve never met in person are familiar with my ups and downs at work, my health, my travels and my ambitions. My openness has been called brave, inspiring, narcissistic and irritating. It’s provided me with an army of acquaintances around the world, but probably no more close friends than if I’d never popped my head above the parapet and uttered (or written) a word.
I wear my commitment to working in the open as a badge of honour and have spent years advocating for others to follow suit.
The problem though, and the reason I’ve been thinking a lot about it, is that I am tired of it and really feel like it is time to shut up. I don’t know whether those peak Covid years rewired something in my head, or whether it is just a by-product of getting older, but the energy required to maintain quite so public a persona has become unsustainable, and increasingly less enjoyable. The challenge though, is that my professional identity is so entangled in my openness, I fear what would happen if I did quiet down.
This fear is my own fault. My career has become a patchwork of short-term jobs, generated by a short attention span, and held together by a loose theme and a high profile. If the profile declines, will it all tumble down like a house of cards?
Source: I thought about that a lot
I missed this when he published it last year, but this strongly-worded and reasoned stuff from Cory Doctorow still applies. He explains why he’ll only ever be found on actually federated social networks. The word he coined, enshittification, can only applied to a captive user base. It makes me think about what I’m doing on Bluesky — which I’ve already described a ‘pound shop Mastodon’.
Look, I’m done. I poured years and endless hours into establishing myself on walled garden services administered with varying degrees of competence and benevolence, only to have those services use my own sunk costs to trap me within their silos even as they siphoned value from my side of the ledger to their own.
[…]
Being a moral actor lies not merely in making the right choice in the moment, but in anticipating the times when you may choose poorly in future, and taking steps to head that off.
[…]
That’s where Ulysses Pacts come in. […] We make little Ulysses Pacts all the time. If you go on a diet and throw away your Oreos, that’s a Ulysses Pact. You’re not betting that you’ll be strong enough to resist their siren song when your body is craving easily available calories; rather, you are being humble enough to recognize your own weakness, and strong enough to take a step to protect yourself from it.
[…]
I have learned my lesson. I have no plans to ever again put effort or energy into establishing myself on an unfederated service. From now on, I will put more weight on how easy it is to leave a service than on what I get from staying. A bad service that you can easily switch away from is incentivized to improve, and if the incentive fails, you can leave.
Source: Pluralistic
I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but this is more like it! Local models that are not only lighter in terms of environmental impact, but are trained on permissively-licensed data.
Training large language models required copyrighted data until it did not. Today we release Pleias 1.0 models, a family of fully open small language models. Pleias 1.0 models include three base models: 350M, 1.2B, and 3B parameters. They feature two specialized models for knowledge retrieval with unprecedented performance for their size on multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Pleias-Pico (350M parameters) and Pleias-Nano (1.2B parameters).
These represent the first ever models trained exclusively on open data, meaning data that are either non-copyrighted or are published under a permissible license. These are the first fully EU AI Act compliant models. In fact, Pleias sets a new standard for safety and openness.
Our models are:
- multilingual, offering strong support for multiple European languages
- safe, showing the lowest results on the toxicity benchmark
- performant for key tasks, such as knowledge retrieval
- able to run efficiently on consumer-grade hardware locally (CPU-only, without quantisation)
[…]
We are moving away from the standard format of web archives. Instead, we use our new dataset composed of uncopyrighted and permissibly licensed data, Common Corpus. To create this dataset, we had to develop an extensive range of tools to collect, to generate, and to process pretraining.
Source: Hugging Face
Image: David Man & Tristan Ferne
I see a lot of AI Literacy frameworks at the moment. Like this one. From my perspective, most of them make similar mistakes, thinking in terms of defined ‘levels’ using some kind of remix of Bloom’s Taxonomy. There’s also an over-emphasis on cognitive aspects such as ‘understanding’ while more community and civic-minded aspects are often under-emphasised.
So if you think that I’m ego-posting this page, created by Angela Gunder for Opened Culture, then you’d be correct. I met Angela for the first time via video conference a few weeks ago after she sent me an email telling me how she’d been using my work for years. We’ve had a couple more chats since and I’m hoping we’ll get to work together in the coming months.
Recently, Angela has been doing work for UNESCO, as well as on an MIT/Hewlett Foundation funded project. For both, she used my Essential Elements of Digital Literacies as a frame, understanding literacies as plural and contextual. WAO is currently working on an update to ailiteracy.fyi so more on all of this in the new year.
The Dimensions of AI Literacies were developed to address the growing need for educators, learners, and leaders to navigate the complexities of AI in education. Remixed from the work of Doug Belshaw’s Essential Elements of Digital Literacies, this approach recognizes that AI literacies are not a binary of literacy vs. illiteracy, but rather consist of a diverse and interconnected set of competencies. By considering AI literacies as a plurality, this taxonomy enables a deeper understanding of how AI can be leveraged to improve the impact of teaching and learning across various sociocultural contexts. This view helps educators design inclusive and adaptive learning experiences, allows learners to engage with AI tools critically and creatively, and empowers leaders to foster responsible and impactful AI integration across their institutions. Additionally, as AI tools and systems continue to expand in quantity and ability, this taxonomy gives strategists and practitioners a flexible vocabulary to use in navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of AI in education. Through these dimensions, educators and leaders are provided with a foundation for building a collaborative and reflective discourse on AI use, encouraging the development of skills that will shape the future of education in meaningful and impactful ways.
When I worked at the Mozilla Foundation a decade ago, there was a programme called Webmaker. There were web apps and Open Source tools that the team created to help people learn how the web works in a practical, hands-on way. My work on web literacy and Open Badges underpinned it (see this white paper for example) with the aim to avoid ‘elegant consumption’.
In this post Gita Jackson points out that elegant consumption via centralised, Big Tech-owned social networks has won the day. The way to resist that is to build your own website. Learning some code is great, but these days Mozilla has a service called Solo which makes it super-easy to have your own website. There are easy ways to run your own blog. It takes more effort, but it’s worth it.
Social media erased the need to build a website to express yourself online. Sure, early social media like MySpace allowed for you to radically change the look and feel of your page—adding music and changing the background—but ultimately, it was still a MySpace page, with a comment wall and your top eight friends. On top of that, MySpace had total ownership of that page, meaning when the site was bought and sold, individual users had no say in the changes. By 2019, you couldn’t even look at your old MySpace accounts anymore because they lost all the data from prior to 2016.
This only accelerated as we moved to new social media, like Facebook, which was determined to keep all important contact information within the app. Instead of a local business making a website on Geocities, they would make themselves a Facebook page—or now, an Instagram account—because all their customers likely had Facebook accounts already.
[…]
It is clear that tech billionaires like Musk know that when they own the means of communication, they run the whole show. If you’ve made a home on Twitter, you’re basically completely vulnerable to Musk’s randomly changing whims, and also his disgusting political beliefs. He campaigned with Trump and immediately congratulated him when he won the election. Also congratulating the President-elect were Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, two tech oligarchs who also want us to use their proprietary apps and websites for everything in our lives.
[…]
To me, having my own website, even one I run as a business with my friends, gives me a degree of freedom over my own work that I’ve never had before. If you look at my work on Kotaku, there’s so many garbage ads on the screen you can barely see the words. Waypoint and Motherboard are both being run like a haunted ship, pumping out junk so that Vice’s new owners can put ads on it. I don’t have to worry about that anymore—I don’t have to worry about my work being taken down or modified or sold, or put in an AI training set against my will. I have my own website, and it is mine, and I get to own it completely. I hope someday soon I can visit your website.
Source: Aftermath
Image: Patrick Tomasso
There are risks with any kind of increased information or data presented to people without the kind of background to understand it. That’s why we have professionals.
There’s also a concern about privacy and data getting into the wrong hands. That’s why we have safeguards.
But, on the other hand, when it comes to smart watches and other health monitoring devices, we’re talking about trying to better understand our own bodies. I’ve got a Garmin smart watch which I use in conjunction with the Garmin app and also with Strava. You’ll pry it from my cold, dead hands
There was one time when I went to the hospital and the consultant was interested in what my watch had been telling me. But, as this article shows, that’s rare.
What we need is some kind of standard way of reporting this data, along with caveats about how it was collected and how much it can be trusted.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has talked about a proposal to give wearables to millions of NHS patients in England, enabling them to track symptoms such as reactions to cancer treatments, from home.
But many doctors – and tech experts – remain cautious about using health data captured by wearables.
I’m currently trying out a smart ring from the firm Ultrahuman – and it seemed to know that I was getting sick before I did.
It alerted me one weekend that my temperature was slightly elevated, and my sleep had been restless. It warned me that this could be a sign I was coming down with something.
I tutted something about the symptoms of perimenopause and ignored it - but two days later I was laid up in bed with gastric flu.
Source: BBC News
Polly Toynbee, writing in The Guardian, argues that we need a wealth tax in the UK. In my opinion, it’s massively overdue. The only people who have benefited from the financial crisis and Brexit are those who were already well-off.
Given that you don’t get to choose how wealthy your parents are, advantages that you get in life from their wealth are a massive impediment to social mobility. Obviously.
Over the next 30 years, an unprecedented avalanche of £5.5tn will land in the laps of those who have chosen their parents wisely. The inheritocracy is ascending into the stratosphere: asset-rich parents are buying homes and advantage for their children and their children’s children, securing ever-rising privilege. Those born in the 1980s are on average due inheritances worth twice as much as those born in the 1960s. Parental income and wealth is a stronger predictor of someone’s lifetime earnings and wealth than in generations before. Inheritance is becoming an obstacle to social mobility.
No politician concerned about inequality, fair opportunities or financing the public realm can ignore wealth any longer. While wages have stagnated for 16 years, wealth has accelerated. Traditionally, policymakers have focused on fairness of incomes. But today, the possession of wealth is proving the greater distortion, with so much of it in effect untaxed. The mantra for a long time was that wealth taxes don’t work. But that can no longer be the answer.
[…]
If Labour wants to achieve things in power, it’s clear it needs more money. Wealth is the place to look.
Source: The Guardian
Image: The New York Public Library
Perhaps I’m just getting old, but this rant resonated with me. Ostensibly, it’s about a particular app shutting down, but I’m quoting the bit more generally about ‘self-hosting’ not being an option for people who do things other than spend every waking moment near a computer.
If there’s one thing I don’t want to be in my forties it’s a system administrator. As time moves on, we abstract away from complexity to provide things as a service, which as far as I’m concerned is exactly as it should be.
One of the other options Omniverse suggests for moving off of its service is self-hosting, which is akin to telling me to go fuck myself. Self-hosting is great if your hobby is self-hosting things. Mine is not. My hobbies are reading things and drawing things and sewing things and climbing up things and feeling guilty about not writing enough things. I very much appreciate that I know how to computer well enough that I could self-host if I had to, could go fork some abandoned Obsidian plugin that hasn’t been updated in 3 years to try and make yet another rotting part of my digital ecosystem rot a little bit less slowly, but that is a terrible use of my time. I already host my own Fediverse server, if by host you mean pay someone in Europe a bunch of money to host it for me and all I have to do is ban some assholes occasionally, because at the moment I have more money than I have time and I simply do not wish to spend my one wild and precious life learning how to configure goddamn Sidekiq to optimize background processing queues just so I can offer my friends a refuge from the dillweed who turned Twitter into a Nazi bar.
Also, you know what people never talk about when they talk about self-hosting? A succession plan. If I suddenly died I don’t have any provisions for making sure the people relying on my little Hometown server aren’t suddenly left up a creek without a paddle. I am not going to host a read-later service just for myself because that would be an incredibly inefficient use of time and resources even if I did have the time and inclination to do so, but I am also not going to host anything else for my friends until I figure out what contingency plans look like. It’s on my list of things to figure out for my will, which is a very long list. This long list sits on another very long list of life TODOs that I never seem to get around to. I have wanted to figure out my will for approximately eight years, and I know that because that is how long ago I got married and we were like “ha ha we should do that soon” and then simply never did. Because life is so complicated, my guy.
Source: The Roof is on Phire
Image: Christopher Gower
This is a long-ish post, the second half of which discusses Bluesky. However, I’m more interested in the first half which talks about the ‘billionarism’ ideology which seems to have infected the world. It’s an anti-civic attitude which captures human value as financial value, and sees contributing to society as a ‘cost’.
Well kids, we live in a world built for billionaires and narcissists, and we pretty much have our whole lives. I know this isn’t news to people of awareness such as yourselves, but the proof is in the pudding now, and the pudding is on fire.
[…]
A “billionaire” is somebody who infects themselves daily with the sick need to amass so much money that they no longer are constrained by societal demands and expectations, but rather are able to impose their own demands and expectations upon society. A billionaire utilizes this power in order to modify society so that even more money comes to them, leaving them even further above the demands and expectations of society, allowing them to impose their will over society to an even greater extent, and so on and so forth. It’s a grave sickness, billionairism—a self-inflicted one, I think I mentioned—and what’s worse is that it’s a sickness whose worst symptoms billionaires force the rest of us to suffer. That’s the first way that billionairism resembles narcissism.
And we should talk about what billionaires do. What they do is get themselves in proximity to the natural value generated by our natural human system—value created by humans simply by being human and living together in proximity to one another, the structure known as “society,” in other words, from which all possible value springs—and then steal it for themselves and only themselves. They capture certain parts of natural generative human value—some human enterprise or process or concept, something other that has been made possible only through the existence of human society, and has only become successful within that context by generating value for other humans—and use their unnaturally stolen value to own it, and then pervert it so that it increasingly stops providing value to others but only sends value to themselves. They then use the stolen value that they have hoarded all for themselves as proof that they are exceptionally valuable people. Meanwhile, there is a certain amount of that stolen value that they still have to give back in order to keep the mechanism of their theft going—an amount that they call “cost,” which they greatly resent—which they use as proof that they are the beneficent source of all value anyone receives.
[…]
It occurs to me that nothing damages billionaires and other narcissists like human community, which is probably why they work so hard to destroy it.
Source: The Reframe
Image: Jp Valery
I’ve got an upcoming interview for a BBC R&D research role and so have been looking at what they’ve been up to recently. As part of that, I came across an experiment called ‘Orbit’ which is a visual way of discovering new music based on listening to audio snippets.
Find 5 new tracks every day from undiscovered artists
Source: Orbit
This post by Neil Brown is a couple of years old now, but he linked to it in the wake of news that the Australian government have announced a ban on social media for under-16s.
As he points out by going through examples, this is entirely unworkable. When I tried to explain this to someone less technical, I realised that unless you enforce biometrics at every login, it’s pretty much impossible to enforce in a good-faith way. And that would be a huge privacy violation of children.
Let’s say that there a multiple countries with similar-but-not-identical laws.
Country A, which says that the website operator is not to provide its service to people in Country A who are under 21.
Country B, which says that the website operator is not to provide its service to people in Country B who are under 25.
And Country C, which says that the website operator is not to provide its service to people in Country C at all.
Assuming that the website operator does not want to shut up shop totally - by applying the most restrictive rule, of Country C, to everyone - and that it does care about the laws in other countries (a big “if”, but it’s my example, so…) how does the website operator establish where the user is located at the point at which they access the site, to know which rule to apply?
tl;dr
I don’t think you can, with any reasonable degree of assurance.
Source: Neil’s blog
Image: julien Tromeur
A great use for machine learning in finding, and hopefully helping to protect, indigenous art covering miles of ground in southern Peru.
Gouged into a barren stretch of pampa in southern Peru, the Nazca Lines are one of archaeology’s most perplexing mysteries. On the floor of the coastal desert, the shallow markings look like simple furrows. But from the air, hundreds of feet up, they morph into trapezoids, spirals and zigzags in some locations, and stylized hummingbirds and spiders in others. There is even a cat with the tail of a fish. Thousands of lines jump cliffs and traverse ravines without changing course; the longest is bullet-straight and extends for more than 15 miles.
The vast incisions were brought to the world’s attention in the mid-1920s by a Peruvian scientist who spotted them while hiking through the Nazca foothills. Over the next decade, commercial pilots passing over the region revealed the enormousness of the artwork, which is believed to have been created from 200 B.C. to 700 A.D. by a civilization that predated the Inca.
The newly found images — an average of 30 feet across — could have been detected in past flyovers if the pilots had known where to look. But the pampa is so immense that “finding the needle in the haystack becomes practically impossible without the help of automation,” said Marcus Freitag, an IBM physicist who collaborated on the project.
To identify the new geoglyphs, which are smaller than earlier examples, the investigators used an application capable of discerning the outlines from aerial photographs, no matter how faint. “The A.I. was able to eliminate 98 percent of the imagery,” Dr. Freitag said. “Human experts now only need to confirm or reject plausible candidates.”
Source: The New York Times
Backup link: Archive Buttons
Last year, I leased an electric vehicle (EV) for the first time: a Polestar 2. It’s incredible; I wouldn’t even consider any other type of car in future.
I don’t have to worry about how long the physical batteries will last, but it’s something that EV skeptics, conspiracy theorists, and fossil fuel lobbyists tend to focus on. That’s why it’s good to see the management consultancy P3 conducting a study to counter some EV battery myths.
The term ‘state of health’ or SoH doesn’t have a standard definition, so it’s just used in this context to refer to EV battery capacity. The findings? Basically that EV batteries last way longer than was assumed. And, given that they can have a second and even third life after being removed from a car, there’s really no reason not to switch to an EV, pronto.
The field data suggests that the actual battery capacity is maintained longer than assumed under real-life conditions, especially with the often-cited high mileages of 200,000 kilometres and more. Based on the cell lab tests, the SoH model published by P3 in 2023 gave a much more pessimistic forecast for battery health. Up to around 50,000 kilometres, the laboratory model and the field data are roughly the same – above 100,000 kilometres. However, the trend lines diverge significantly. P3 concludes that the actual user-profiles and the control of the cells by the battery management system in the field significantly reduce ageing.
But how can the observed variation be explained? After all, some vehicles still have an extremely high SoH after more than 50,000 kilometres, while individual vehicles are still at 98 per cent after almost 200,000 kilometres – while others quickly fall below 90 per cent. In fact, the charging and usage behaviour of drivers and the vehicles themselves influence this, as do the manufacturers. On the one hand, the intended buffer (i.e., the difference between gross and net capacity) plays an important role in terms of size and utilisation of the buffer. That is because it can be used, for example, to reduce the noticeable ageing during the warranty period – by releasing a little more net capacity over time. On the other hand, the charging behaviour can be adjusted via a software update. On the one hand, this can be a higher charging power for shorter charging times, which leads to more stress in the cell. On the other hand, it is also possible that an update improves the control of the cells, for example, by optimising preconditioning to reduce stress during fast charging under sub-optimal conditions.
Source: electrive
Data, or rather organised data is an incredibly valuable commodity in the modern world. Large Language Models (LLMs) which underpin the latest generative AI applications need ever-increasing amounts of it to develop more complex functionality.
Pokémon Go was controversial when it came out because there were so many people playing it that it was causing chaos when so-called ‘gyms’ and game characters were randomly placed in various real-world neighbourhoods. Now it transpires that the makers of the game are developing the equivalent of an LLM for ‘visual positioning’ and that this might be used for military applications. FML, as they say.
Uh, so here’s something interesting. Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, published a long blog post last week outlining a new project they’ve been working on called a Large Geospatial Model, essentially a Large Language Model but for visualizing and mapping physical space. They’re calling it the Visual Positioning System, or VPS, and they plan to use it for future augmented reality products and robotics. The idea of mapping the whole world has been a big priority for Niantic over the last few years.
One new feature for Pokémon Go that uses VPS is called Pokémon Playgrounds and it lets a user place a virtual Pokémon on a location and other players will find that Pokémon where they left it.
Though, as Elise Thomas, over at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, pointed out, it seems almost undeniable that this will not just power fun game mechanics. “It’s so incredibly 2020s coded that Pokemon Go is being used to build an AI system which will almost inevitably end up being used by automated weapons systems to kill people,” Thomas wrote.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: David Grandmougin
I initially thought this announcement from Tuvalu was from this month’s COP meeting, COP29. But it turns out that it was announced two years ago, and the update below was announced last year, at COP28.
It’s a sad but fascinating prospect: a nation without land, preserved digitally and with services available to the Tuvaluan diaspora after climate change means their physical territory disappears beneath the waves.
This is a more extreme version of Estonia’s e-Residency programme which was launched a decade ago. In that case, the threat was from other nation states, namely Russia.
I remember quite a few years ago at the Thinking Digital conference, just as the cryptocurrency craze was beginning, someone stood on stage and predicted the death of nation states, with people instead choosing digital nationhood. I don’t think it will be as binary as that. It’s much more likely to be something akin to dual nationality.
With time running out, Tuvalu has no choice but to start planning for this worst-case scenario. At COP27 (2022), Tuvaluan Minister Simon Kofe announced that Tuvalu will become the First Digital Nation: that it would digitally recreate its land, archive its rich history and culture, and move all governmental functions into a digital space.
This digital transformation will allow Tuvalu to retain its identity and continue to function as a state, even after its physical land is gone. It will also facilitate the governance of a Tuvaluan diaspora by creating a virtual space where Tuvaluans can connect with each other, explore ancestry and culture, and access new opportunities for business and commerce in various industries. Moreover, a permanent digital replica of Tuvalu – a new “defined territory” – will aid in the fight for continued sovereignty under international law.
Since the initial announcement of the First Digital Nation, Tuvalu has:
- Completed a comprehensive three-dimensional LIDAR scan of all 124 islands and islets, laying the foundation for its digital nation and helping redefine its territory in the eyes of international law.
- Begun upgrading its national communications infrastructure with the installation of two submarine cables, ensuring sufficient bandwidth for the transition to the cloud.
- Started exploring a digital ID system, which will use the blockchain to connect the Tuvaluan diaspora and allow them to participate in Tuvaluan life, wherever they are.
- Begun building a living archive of Tuvaluan culture, curated by its people. Citizens will be invited to contribute their most treasured personal items for digital preservation, creating a living record of Tuvaluan values.
- Amended its constitution to reflect a new definition of statehood – the first of its kind in the world. The amendment pronounces that the State of Tuvalu within its historical, cultural, and legal framework shall remain in perpetuity in the future, notwithstanding the impacts of climate change or other causes resulting in loss to the physical territory of Tuvalu.
Source: Tuvalu.tv
My workflow for Thought Shrapnel is roughly: come across interesting article, save it to Pocket, revisit and write about it. There are plenty of articles that I don’t write about, and I sometimes go on hiatus from this blog for a while.
As I get older, I don’t really understand the desire to capture all of the things and link them together. It can become fetishistic, and obession. I seem to do alright in my personal and professional lives in terms of remembering stuff and combining them in new and interesting ways. And don’t particularly have a ‘system’. I just remember stuff that I’ve written about, and especially when I’ve written about it multiple times.
This article talks about the freedom of forgetting stuff. We’re loathe to let things go into the ether because we ascribe value to the things we’ve collected. However, I suppose because I’ve collected, written, and jettisoned so much stuff in my life, I’m very comfortable in getting rid of it. I don’t need a million tabs open, a bookmarks manager stuffed with links, or a meticulous system. My approach is based on curiosity, interest, and writing about stuff.
That’s the true value of notebooks, notes apps, bookmarking tools, and everything else built to help us remember. They’re insurance for ideas. They let us forget.
[…]
We need to forget, but we first must feel safe forgetting.
[…]
We didn’t need bookmarks and notes as much as we needed the safety of letting go. Anywhere we could save our thoughts was enough.
Source: Reproof
Image: Omar Al-Ghosson
I came across this blog post this morning and I can’t stop thinking about it. I wish I’d seen it when it was published a few months ago.
The author gives it the provocative title The Mainstreaming of Loserdom, explaining that it seems to have become normal for people to not only admit to having “no hobbies, no interests, no verve,” but be positively “gleeful” about it. It seems that a trend that had already been set in motion was accelerated due to the pandemic.
I needed to share the post here because I’m conflicted about it. On the one hand, I’ve never had a particularly interesting social life — at least by other people’s standards. On the other, I’m one of the people the author talks about that creates stuff on the internet.
What I think we’ve got is more people online than ever before, and so a larger sub-section of people who are, if not clinically depressed, certainly acting in a way that gives off morose vibes. They’re living life through the lens of consumption, something which our economic system incentivises. After all, it’s difficult to monetise people just hanging out having a chat. Unless it’s a podcast, I guess 😉
It was clear twenty years ago that someone who rarely engaged with their peers, didn’t really have friends, and didn’t really leave their house wasn’t aspirational: they were odd.
I know what people are going to say: not everyone drinks, not everyone parties, we have social anxiety, everything is too expensive… People simply aren’t connecting the way they used to, and I won’t be the bad guy for pointing out that it doesn’t surprise me that people are desperately lonely while also saying their favorite hobby is… staying home.
[…]
I’ll also defend myself preemptively and say not everyone has the same threshold for social interaction, which again, is fine. My issue is that I do not believe that the millions of people engaging with these posts all have very literal tolerance for social interaction.
[…]
I’ve been on the internet for twenty years: I’ve been on fanfiction.net, I’ve been on Livejournal, I’ve been on Tumblr. I was surrounded by people who spent time alone, but they were creating. They were writing, they were generating, they were knitting and sewing and painting and dreaming. The specific activity I’m talking about is a lack of any of this. The people screaming from their rooftops about how they don’t go anywhere and don’t have any friends aren’t the same people writing 70,000 words of Harry/Draco smut, I’m sorry! I know my people, and this feels different. It feels more sinister. Posting fanfiction online is a bid for community. Scrolling on your phone is not.
Source: Telling the Bees
“The systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another” wrote C. West Churchman. Seeing things from another’s point of view is usually framed as ‘empathy’ but often what isn’t discussed is the effect that a change in perspective can have on a person themselves. This is sometimes colloquially and humorously referred to as “things we cannot unsee”. It’s automatic: the way we understand the world has changed.
Stephen Downes shared this recently-updated article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about a topic which I’ve only studied obliquiely. ‘Perceptual learning’ is about long-lasting changes in perception resulting from practice or experience, and can take four forms: differentiation, unitization, attentional weighting, and stimulus imprinting.
When most people reflect on perceptual learning, the cases that tend to come to mind are cases of differentiation. In differentiation, a person comes to perceive the difference between two properties, where they could not perceive this difference before. It is helpful to think of William James’ case of a person learning to distinguish between the upper and lower half of a particular kind of wine. Prior to learning, one cannot perceive the difference between the upper and lower half. However, through practice one becomes able to distinguish between the upper and lower half. This is a paradigm case of differentiation.
[…]
Unitization is the counterpart to differentiation. In unitization, a person comes to perceive as a single property, what they previously perceived as two or more distinct properties. One example of unitization is the perception of written words. When we perceive a written word in English, we do not simply perceive two or more distinct letters. Rather, we perceive those letters as a single word. Put another way, we perceive written words as a single unit (see Smith & Haviland 1972). This is not the case with non-words. When we perceive short strings of letters that are not words, we do not perceive them as a single unit.
[…]
In attentional weighting, through practice or experience people come to systematically attend toward certain objects and properties and away from other objects and properties. Paradigm cases of attentional weighting have been shown in sports studies, where it has been found, for instance, that expert fencers attend more to their opponents’ upper trunk area, while non-experts attend more to their opponents’ upper leg area (Hagemann et al., 2010). Practice or experience modulates attention as fencers learn, shifting it towards certain areas and away from other areas.
[…]
Recall that in unitization, what previously looked like two or more objects, properties, or events later looks like a single object, property, or event. Cases of “stimulus imprinting” are like cases of unitization in the end state (you detect a whole pattern), but there is no need for the prior state—no need for that pattern to have previously looked like two or more objects, properties, or events. This is because in stimulus imprinting, the perceptual system builds specialized detectors for whole stimuli or parts of stimuli to which a subject has been repeatedly exposed (Goldstone 1998: 591). Cells in the inferior temporal cortex, for instance, can have a heightened response to particular familiar faces (Perrett et al., 1984, cited in Goldstone 1998: 594).
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Image: CHUTTERSNAP
Amidst the drama around the WordPress project at the moment (which is, in my experience only a public version of what goes on behind the scenes of any major Open Source project) I was interested in a post by Matt Mullenweg.
I’ve been using Llama 3 on projects where it wouldn’t be appropriate to use OpenAI’s offerings, but I should have known that, given it’s from Meta, there would be some shenanigans. And so it proves.
I’ll not share the rest of the post, given Matt’s ‘ecosystem thinking’ seems a bit disingenuous given the spat he’s engaged in, but this bit shocked me.
Open Source, once ridiculed and attacked by the professional classes, has taken over as an intellectual and moral movement. Its followers are legion within every major tech company. Yet, even now, false prophets like Meta are trying to co-opt it. Llama, its “open source” AI model, is free to use—at least until “monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month.” Seriously.
Excuse me? Is that registered users? Visitors to WordPress-powered sites? (Which number in the billions.) That’s like if the US Government said you had freedom of speech until you made over 50 grand in the preceding calendar year, at which point your First Amendment rights were revoked. No! That’s not Open Source. That’s not freedom.
I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom. It’s a proprietary license, issued at Meta’s discretion and whim. If you use it, you’re effectively a vassal state of Meta.
When corporations disingenuously claim to be “open source” for marketing purposes, it’s a clear sign that Open Source is winning.
Source: Ma.tt
Image: Managing Data Hazards by Yasmin Dwiputri & Data Hazards Project
Abi Handley shared the above image on LinkedIn from a web developer who, back in 2022, worked out all of the time they spent on a project. Unsurprisingly, as anyone who has ever led a project will know, it’s the “work to do the work” which takes the most time.
When you’re younger, enthusiasm, energy and naivety tend to get you to the end of a project. When you’re in your forties, like me, it’s process. This post talks about running a ‘postmortem’ but we insist on pre-mortems as well as retrospectives. We minimise ‘status update’ meetings, using tools such as Trello to track task completion and Loom to explain things that would take too long via email.
Additionally, some people seem to think that being ‘professional’ means not bringing your emotions to work. But emotion is what makes us human, and so acknowledging this and factoring it into to projects is one of the keys to running them successfully.
I had been aware during the project that there seemed to be a lot of “extra work”, but putting it down on paper highlighted the multitude of “invisible” tasks and challenges which every web development project has.
There were two common threads:
- much of the work was the “work to do the work” rather than the “actual” work
- most of the work was under- or un-estimated because it wasn’t the “actual” work
Source: Dave Stewart
I don’t think this is a new ‘False Knees’ cartoon, but it’s a great one and gave me a chuckle, especially at this time of the year. My SAD light is out, and it’s chilly in Northumberland.
Source: False Knees
I feel like this should perhaps be bigger news?
Boundaries that have already been exceeded have to do with climate change, freshwater availability, biodiversity, land use, nutrient pollution (such as phosphorus and nitrogen) and the introduction of synthetic chemicals and plastics to the environment.
Ocean acidification is one of the systems that has not yet crossed its planetary boundary, along with ozone depletion and aerosols in the atmosphere. But while ocean acidification is still in the “green zone,” the new report finds it’s trending in the wrong direction. Scientists now say this metric is on the brink and may cross out of the safe zone in the next few years.
Earth’s oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, providing a valuable carbon sink as humans burn fossil fuels. But this process also makes the oceans more acidic, which can disturb the formation of shells and coral skeletons and affect fish life cycles, per the report.
As ocean acidification approaches the boundary, scientists are particularly concerned about certain regions, like the Arctic and Southern oceans. These areas are vital for carbon and global nutrient cycles, “which support marine productivity, biodiversity and global fisheries,” the report says.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Given the groups who financed Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to see the events relating to the platform over the past few years as an attempt to stifle progressive discourse.
It’s been seven years since I deleted 77.5k tweets I composed between 2007 and 2017. I could see the way the wind was blowing, even before Musk’s acquisition. The latest news is that blocked users will still be able to see the tweets of the person who’s blocked them, which is just a troll’s charter.
If, for some reason, you’re still on there, perhaps it’s time to leave?
X will now make your posts visible to users you’ve blocked. In a reply on Monday, X owner Elon Musk said the “block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, public post.”
[…]
Musk has been vocal about his dislike of the block button. Last year, he said the feature “makes no sense” and that “it needs to be deprecated in favor of a stronger form of mute.” He also threatened to stop letting users block people on the platform completely, except for direct messages.
Source: The Verge
Image: BoliviaInteligente
This article examines how religious communities, particularly nuns and monks, approach productivity differently from the modern, output-driven culture. It highlights how members of religious orders redefine productivity as rooted in spiritual fulfilment, sufficiency, and human connection rather than constant work and economic gain.
These experiences suggest that true productivity lies in fruitfulness and grace, not in relentless efficiency, which offers somewhat of a countercultural perspective to the capitalist emphasis on always doing more.
We are conditioned to listen to podcasts while washing up, read books on the commute and dash out emails while drinking a morning coffee. I can’t even ‘just’ watch a Netflix show without needing something else to do, so resort to doing cross stitch in front of the TV in order to put my phone down. This is the efficiency for which we congratulate ourselves, getting more done in the same time. I draw the line at the growing trend for listening to podcasts at double speed to inhale the same information more efficiently, less fruitfully.
When I first raised the idea of writing this piece, and put out the rather niche call for nuns, priests and monks willing to be interviewed about productivity culture, I was struck by the number of responses from people desperate to read it. The desire for wisdom about life and work that isn’t geared just towards increasing the latter is real.
There were points in every one of the conversations I had with Sister Liz, Sister Gabriel, Father Thomas and Father Sam, in the middle of my working day, that felt like a mirror being held up, both gently and painfully, to the busyness and imbalance of my own life. If Melville was right that nothing is what it is except for contrast, then the lessons of the religious life for those of us grappling with the need to be ‘productive’ are surely our greatest example.
Source: THEOS
The last paragraph of this post by Julian Stodd, which I discovered via OLDaily, points to something emancipatory about generative AI that I think some people may have missed:
An interesting feature of the Generative AI revolution is that whilst the technologies themselves are monumental, both in terms of complexity and physical energy and scale, it may well be individuals, at scale, who drive the true change. Not a single technology that breaks in, but rather people breaking out. Breaking out of restrictive and constrained structure.
Stodd is part of a doctoral programme, and (with no lack of hyperbole) discusses how his cohort is likely to be “the last to really read books… to really write for myself… to be confused and lost in thought.” He calls this a “landscape of havoc and fracture” and points to four dimensions of this shift:
Dialogic Engines – synchronous iteration and exploration of ideas, warping legacy ideas of trust, self doubt, foolishness, failure, and curiosity. As we wrote in ‘Engines of Enagement’, Generative AI makes high quality dialogue a commodity, but not simply as a service – it shifts the social context of such. So we can be in dialogue as a solo feature, removing all social judgement of curiosity and ignorance, if we dare.
Agentic Retrieval – not just a search engine, but a context setting system. These tools can shift the boundaries of context – not telling us what we asked for, but giving us what we may need. And from a perspective of virtually unbounded knowledge. We can factor this into our dialogue – asking for breadth and challenge to our thinking – or we may find it just lands. I think that systems shifting context is highly significant, as the fracture and evolution of context is a key part of insight and even paradigmatic change.
Trans-disciplinarity as the norm: our taxonomies of knowledge are not natural, but rather shaped by legacy mechanisms of need, discovery, ownership, and understanding. We have tended to segment our knowledge and hence structures of learning (as well as power, status, and identity) vertically around these themes. So we have engineers and poets, but not many poetic engineers. I think Generative AI changes this in significant ways, if we allow it to: permits a broadening of vocabulary and conception, a translation engine if you like, but also a provocative one – if we ask or if it offers.
The Primacy of Sense Making: I’ve said for some time that knowledge itself is shifting in the context of the Social Age, and Generative AI scales this change. The latest GenAI tools are Engines of Synthesis, reflection and contextualisation, leaving us in a radically broadened landscape of sense making as individual and collective feature. And I don’t think sense making per se is at threat of absorption by technology. Not that the Engines cannot make sense, just that our act of consumption is inherently linked to re-contextualisation and insight. In other words, if the technology has already chewed it over, we will chew it over again. It just broadens the space and foundations for us to do so.
I’ve been using GPT-4o for my MSc and it’s so much better and deeper to learn with an assistant than to rely on what’s provided to you as a student, and what you can discover by just wading through books and articles.
Source: Julian Stodd’s Learning Blog
Prof. Ivona Hideg writes about a study she carried out during the pandemic around men and women leaders. While both experienced higher levels of anxiety, the amount of ‘abusive supervision’ was lower in women. The study was limited in terms of gender identification and sexual orientation, but it’s still interesting.
For me, this study supports what I have experienced in my career to date: women tend to be better at regulating their emotions, which the exact opposite of the stereotype of women in leadership positions.
In our research, we investigated 137 leader-report pairs working in Europe (primarily the Netherlands) in the service (38%), public (28%), or information and technology (23%) sectors during the early phases of the pandemic in 2020. The majority of leaders were men (56%), Dutch (59%), white (92%), and heterosexual (95%). The majority of direct reports were women (56%), Dutch (60%), white (89%), and heterosexual (88%). These leaders reported their emotions during the pandemic; their reports then rated their leaders’ behaviors.
Women leaders reported higher levels of anxiety regarding the pandemic than men leaders. There were no gender differences in feelings of hope toward the pandemic. When leaders’ anxiety was higher, so was their abusive supervision, whereas when leaders’ hope was higher, so was their family-supportive supervision. Critically, supporting our hypotheses, we found that these relationships between leaders’ emotions and behaviors depended on their gender. Leaders’ emotions were only related to their leadership behaviors if they were men, but not if they were women.
Namely, in line with gender role and emotional labor theory, women leaders engaged in low levels of abusive supervision regardless of how anxious they felt about the pandemic. By contrast, men leaders engaged in more abusive supervision, including behaviors such as being rude, ridiculing, yelling at, or lying to their reports when their anxiety was higher. Women leaders also provided high levels of family-supportive supervision irrespective of how hopeful they felt about the pandemic. By contrast, men leaders provided family-supportive supervision only when they felt more hopeful.
Source: Harvard Business Review
We’ve just started on a Mozilla-funded Friends of the Earth project at the moment around sustainability principles for AI. There seems to be a lot of noise around the amount of water employed to cool the data centres used to train large language models (LLMs).
While we should always be cognisant of the amount of the energy and water used to provide us with new (and existing) technologies, I think there’s a lack of statistical numeracy going on here. For example, in the UK, 51 litres of water per person are lost due to leakage every day. That’s over a trillion litres per year!
Alan Levine shared a link to this visualisation in the thread where I was discussing this stuff on the Fediverse.
Source: Information is Beautiful
A long-ish and important post by Paris Marx in which he argues for a middle path between the ‘cyberlibertarianism’ of Silicon Valley and the China firewall approach. Just as the laws in most countries have a common based but a different flavour, so I think we’ll see an increasing alignment of what’s allowed online with what’s allowed offline in various jurisdictions.
Instead of solely fighting for digital rights, it’s time to expand that focus to digital sovereignty that considers not just privacy and speech, but the political economy of the internet and the rights of people in different countries to carve out their own visions for their digital futures that don’t align with a cyberlibertarian approach. When we look at the internet today, the primary threat we face comes from massive corporations and the billionaires that control them, and they can only be effectively challenged by wielding the power of government to push back on them. Ultimately, rights are about power, and ceding the power of the state to right-wing, anti-democratic forces is a recipe for disaster, not for the achievement of a libertarian digital utopia. We need to be on guard for when governments overstep, but the kneejerk opposition to internet regulation and disingenuous criticism that comes from some digital rights groups do us no good.
The actions of France and Brazil do have implications for speech, particularly in the case of Twitter/X, but sometimes those restrictions are justified — whether it’s placing stricter rules on what content is allowable on social media platforms, limiting when platforms can knowingly ignore criminal activity, and even banning platforms outright for breaching a country’s local rules. We’re entering a period where internet restrictions can’t just be easily dismissed as abusive actions taken by authoritarian governments, but one where they’re implemented by democratic states with the support of voting publics that are fed up with the reality of what the internet has become. They have no time for cyberlibertarian fantasies.
Counter to the suggestions that come out of the United States, the Chinese model is not the only alternative to Silicon Valley’s continued dominance. There is an opportunity to chart a course that rejects both, along with the pressures for surveillance, profit, and control that drive their growth and expansion. Those geopolitical rivals are a threat to any alternative vision that rejects the existing neo-colonial model of digital technology in favor of one that gives countries authority over the digital domain and the ability for their citizens to consider what tech innovation for the public good could look like. Digital sovereignty will look quite different from the digital world we’ve come to expect, but if the internet has any hope for a future, it’s a path we must fight to be allowed to take.
Source: Disconnect
Image: Tjeerd Royaards
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the place where a famous artist, or musician, or writer was born/worked/died? Although it might be interesting on a surface level, the likelihood is that whoever it was escaped their environment into a world of imagination.
Less tedious to look at are artefacts such as notes, scribbled ideas and marginalia. What happens to all this, though, with a purely digital workflow? What will future historians have to work with? I’m guessing famous writers are similar to me: I don’t write letters to my wife, I sent her messages on Signal; I don’t scribble down ideas on scraps of paper, I make digital notes; I don’t scribble in books; I highlight sections on Kindle or Google Books.
More importantly—for a biographer or anyone trying to tell a good story—the digital version of a hastily scribbled note pinned to the apartment door is less tangible and thus harder to romanticize. Text messages still don’t evoke adventure, even if they are the invisible engine behind most of what happens. They inherently violate the “show don’t tell” rule; they are all telling and no showing. […]
Analog media may not convey information as efficiently, but it has other benefits that may be easier to appreciate in hindsight. It is more decorative. It furnishes the physical environment in a way that digital technology—always evolving toward smaller, smoother, and lighter—does not. Or to put it another way: When digital technology is visible it’s usually because it failed to be invisible. The exception to this is the ever-present screen, which remains visible by definition, obviously; screens now account for nearly all of a computer’s tangible presence in the world. And screens are the exception that prove the rule because, as Byung-Chul Han has noted, we look through them rather than at them. Screens don’t decorate the physical environment so much as they invite us to stare through a window into a different kind of non-place.
Source: Kneeling Bus
I’m a big fan of srirarcha sauce, so this ode by Jay Rayner to ‘lifting’ ordinary dishes with the addition of things you find in cupboards and fridges, spoke to me. My tips? Try coconut in your porridge, and balsamic vinegar (or pesto) on your next pizza.
Where dinner is concerned, God is always in the detail. By this, I mean the kind of dinner you scarf by yourself when it’s so late it’s almost early; the thing you eat when nobody is watching and the options are meagre but you still regard yourself as a person of high gastronomic standards, who sees the lowliest of food items as merely the opening salvo in a negotiation.
Which is how I found myself one night pelting a chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle which just happened to be lurking in the cupboard, with freshly sliced spring onions and batons of ginger, shiny black ribbons of finely chopped toasted nori and dollops of sriracha sauce and crispy chilli oil. And lo: the humble instant noodle has been elevated to the king of snacks, courtesy of my exquisitely honed culinary sensibility, and my endearing conviction that more really is always more.
[…]
A friend of mine describes doing all this as adding “kitchen lipstick”. I get her point: it’s the application of seemingly small details which vastly elevate the otherwise everyday. The original purchase suggests questionable taste. The adornments and embellishments restore one’s sense of self. Perhaps right now you have lurking in the fridge a pot of that grim corner-shop hummus, looking to stunt double as tile grouting? Why not go the full Ottolenghi and decorate it with toasted pine nuts, a thick dusting of smoked paprika, an extra dribble of that grassy olive oil over there and, for a final flourish, finely chopped flat-leaf parsley? Add fancy whole grain mustard and manuka honey to the cheapest of sausages, and glugs of madeira and a spoonful of dijon to instant gravy.
Source: The Guardian
I took this photo on Friday night, just after setting up my tent in Eskdale. This is like the land that time forgot on the other side of the Hardknott Pass and somewhere that tourists to the Lake District seldom visit.
Wild camping, while officially illegal in England, is tolerated if you stay out of the way and use some common sense. Before I went, I looked at some other spots, and so wanted to share those with you for your enjoyment.
If you dream of a serene night by a gentle river, look no further than Eskdale. This elongated valley with the River Esk running through it offers perfect wild camping spots with stunning vistas of Scafell and Woolpack Point. During the day, Hardknott Roman Fort and Stanley Ghyll Waterfall are within reach.
Source: IDEAL magazine
Have you noticed that most news articles, blog posts, and social media updates that talk about AI use weird robots and unconvincing imagery? This website, which I discovered via Anne Hilliger seeks to address that.
There’s a wide range of Creative Commons-licensed options which I’ll be using to accompany stuff I write about AI — including this post!
Images representing AI as sentient robots mask the accountability of the humans actually developing the technology, and can suggest the presence of robots where there are none.
Such images potentially sow fear, and research shows they can be laden with historical assumptions about gender, ethnicity and religion.
However, finding alternatives can be difficult! That’s why we, a non-profit collaboration, are researching, creating, curating and providing Better Images of AI.
Source: Better Images of AI
Stephen Downes has written a couple of articles relating Generative AI (GenAI) and Open Education Resources (OER). In the first one, he responds to a blog post by Heather Ross, who argues that the “sould of open is in danger.” Downes is having none of it, and responds to her point by point.
I’m in agreement with all of it, and particularly with how ‘gatekeep-y’ (my word) the OER community can be. (I say this with deep love and respect for what the OER community has achieved, but it is somewhat insular and ivory tower-focused.)
There are a few people who have created a cottage industry for themselves by opposing every aspect of artificial intelligence. I think they’re wrong, and have concerns about them misleading educators about AI. But Heather Ross’s article takes it a step further.
This is colonialism:
“No, you don’t get to wash over or destroy the work we’ve done and the great work still to come within the open movement.” If those encouraging the use of GenAI for open or for GenAI to replace open want to play a new game, that’s fine. We can’t stop you, but get off our field.”
It’s not your field.
And then, in the second post, which contains too many excellent and nuanced thoughts to summarise adequately, Downes sets his sights on what we mean by ‘free learning’. I’m sharing the part about colonialism because I think he gets to the nub of the problem: what people are often complaining about when they’re complaining about AI as ‘colonialist’ is that they are being colonised.
This is, of course, a problem, but the underlying issues are much more structural than people usually think. As Downes points out, what is necessary here isn’t to merely perpetuate the mindset of ‘giving’ people education, but rather to find ways “for a community to communicate with itself” in ways that reduce their reliance on other (usually more powerful) communities and interests.
The only real difference between what we’ll call ‘AI colonialism’ and ‘Good Old Fashioned Colonialism’ is in who is being colonized and who is doing the colonizing. In the case of GOFC, it was one nation colonizing another. In the case of AIC, it is one sector of the economy colonizing the rest. Though if we pause and consider for a bit we’ll find it’s not so different after all: in most societies, developed and otherwise, there is a structural colonialism, where one wealthier sector of society extracts value from the other, and then sells (or in the case of charity, ‘gives’) it back as a value-laden alternative.
I am so sympathetic with those who are opposing AI on these grounds, though my charity is extended only grudgingly to those who have only recently made the switch from colonizer to colonized. And my real loyalties are with those who have always been colonized - not only those in Eswatini (who have to their credit have resisted colonization better than many) but also those in my own society and those like mine, who contribute with their language(s), system of laws, culture and traditions, social knowledge, values and beliefs, etc., and find an educational system - and knowledge economy generally - sold back to them, inevitably changed by the values and beliefs of those who performed the appropriation.
This is an unsustainable model. Over time, it not only reduces the wealth of the subjected population, it also reduces the capacity of the provider (or ‘donor’) community generate wealth without these inputs (one imagines that a company like Disney would flounder without the privilege to incorporate and repurpose Arab or Indigenous culture and folklore).
[…]
Whether or not AI succeeds as a technology is moot; neither blocking AI nor regulating the industry will alter the model of aggregation and exploitation that it exemplifies. The knowledge, learning and information industries will continue to exist, and with or without AI will continue to harvest community language(s), system of laws, culture and traditions, social knowledge, values and beliefs, etc., and in some fashion reshape them according to their own values and sell them back to the community.
And this brings us back to what, to my mind, is the real purpose of open educational resources. They represent a means, mostly (though not exclusively) through digital technology, for a community to communicate with itself, to gather and share knowledge, to pass along its values and mores, its ideas and beliefs, and to be able to do this without reliance on external knowledge, information and learning providers.
[…]
It - to me, at least - was never about giving people an education (or giving them rights, or freedoms or anything else). It was about people being able to create these things for itself.
Sources:
Image: tribesh kayastha
I’ve already shared “technologist and climate geek” Ben James' most recent blog post about off-grid solar power. Digging into other posts unearthed one about his opinion that either “a country with no choice” or a billionaire will unilaterally start spraying sulphur into the stratosphere to help cool the earth. Or at least stop it heating so quickly.
Solar Radiation Management (SRM), as it’s known, is controversial, but has become less so recently. There’s an argument to be made that the $20 billion cost per year would be well worth it to buy us more time. I don’t know enough about this, but it’s clear that this is something that is likely to be on the table as a strategy, and probably won’t go through the UN or an international body first.
Sulfur disappears from the atmosphere quickly - it rains out after about a year. This means that once we’ve started SRM, it’s dangerous to suddenly stop. We need to keep spraying particles, all the time. If we suddenly stopped, the warming would spring back rapidly, causing a bad temperature shock. The correct way to stop is a gradual phase out.
Unfortunately, Solar Radiation Management (SRM) has some fairly gigantic problems.
It doesn’t fix the root cause. Cooling the planet does not remove the CO2 which has accumulated in our atmosphere. It doesn’t stop that CO2 from acidifying the oceans and irreversibly destroying marine biodiversity.
SRM could make us complacent about dramatically cutting emissions.
Sulfur increases acid rain (harmful to many life forms) and will likely harm the ozone.
If SRM is poorly implemented, it could dramatically change weather and rainfall patterns. For example, if sulfur is not injected near the equator, it will not evenly mix into the stratosphere, causing uneven cooling and heating.
[…]
Crucially, the biggest problems with SRM are probably not yet known. The side effects of putting sulfur into the stratosphere could be some of the most consequential unknowns in human history. Clearly, that’s a huge reason to do more research. But still - no matter how much research is done, when humanity tries to bend nature to its will, we can be sure that unintended consequences won’t be far behind.
[…]
People underestimate how controversial it can become to not do SRM. Imagine you are the leader of a country close to the equator. Crop failures, extreme heat, and city-destroying cyclones mean that your people are without drinkable water, have nowhere to sleep, and cannot feed their children. Mass social unrest and physical violence become normal for your country. SRM is the only action that you can take to turn off the disasters, and prevent your government being overthrown.
[..]
Ultimately, the decision to turn on the SRM machines will not be made by climate scientists, or carefully calculated risks. It will be made on the basis of nations rising or falling - by starving populations, revolutionaries, and leaders with their back against a wall.
[…]
Geoengineering is no replacement for getting our shit together. But there would be no honour in allowing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, simply because they could have theoretically been avoided through more mitigation.
[…]
SRM might not make sense in your mind (it certainly doesn’t in mine). But do you view the world in the same way as a military dictator, “benevolent” billionaire, or leader of a starving country?
Source: Ben James
There’s a scene in one of my favourite films, The Dark Knight in which Arthur, Bruce Wayne’s butler, explains that “some men just want to watch the world burn.” There are some mighty fine memes as a result.
But it’s true. Sometimes it’s because they’ve got no power, so they might as well provoke something that might be entertaining. What have they got to lose. Other times, it’s because they’ve got all the power, and they have crazy theories about world overpopulation.
Either way, there’s new research into this mindset which shows that this is a psychological trait separate to others. I’m going to quote Brian Klaas at length, who explains in an excellent post.
These people, according to the new research, share a desire to “unleash chaos to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.” This trait now has a name — and an established psychological profile.
It’s called the “Need for Chaos.” Understanding it provides an important insight into the destructive world of modern politics, in which the trolls have taken over, and politicians are no longer problem solvers, but are rather political influencers. It’s not about making the world better. It’s about burning down the world of people they hate.
[…]
In particular, people who score high on this metric tend to answer that they agree with several of these statements:
I get a kick when natural disasters strike in foreign countries.
I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over.
I think society should be burned to the ground.
When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking “just let them all burn.”
We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.
I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.
Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.
Then, to make sure that people weren’t just ticking the box next to every question mindlessly, the researchers included two additional statements that were the opposite of the other seven:
We need to uphold order by doing what is right, not what is wrong.
It’s better to live in a society where there is order and clear rules than one where anything goes.
Interestingly, when they looked at other toxic personality profiles — such as psychopathy (being a psychopath) and social dominance orientation (an urge to assert social dominance) — they found that the Need for Chaos was a separate dimension to destructive individuals. It wasn’t just capturing the same impulse.
It’s a unique trait.
[…]
The Need for Chaos trait is particularly damaging for individuals who also feel that they’ve been failed by society, manifesting in their loneliness. For them, sowing chaos is a way to lash out against the system while asserting their power and trying to establish some form of social status.
[…]
That creates a strange dynamic, in which most white men—by virtue of their historically privileged position in society—tend to score lower on Need for Chaos than other groups. However, when white men do score high on Need for Chaos, it’s particularly dangerous. To put it plainly, the research suggests that of those who have this chaotic trait, it’s most destructive when that person is a white man.
[…]
The challenge for modern politics, then, lies with figuring out a way to deal with the inevitable perceived loss of social status that accompanies a society that’s becoming more equal, while mitigating the damage that these aggrieved chaos agents can inflict on everyone else.
Source: The Garden of Forking Paths
A decade ago, I was going to so many in-person conferences that I had both a dedicated blog and Twitter account. These days, I attend rather less. No longer being on Twitter, and my conference blog long-ago being mothballed, I’m lacking a place to put reflections on events.
The purpose of this post isn’t even that, to be honest. I was just so blown away by Indy Johar’s presentation at the Systems Innovation Network conference today that I needed somewhere less ephemeral to put the notes that I managed to tap out with my thumb.
Don’t ask me questions about any of this. Not only am I still new to the whole world of systems thinking, but Indy seems to have a galaxy-level brain. Go and check out the Dark Matter Labs website.
Situating the moment:
Climate breakdown (not change, losing predictability and insurability - therefore access to capital markets)
Mass multi-polar, multi-perspectival transition (different kinds of transitions in different parts of the world)
Securitization of everything (pervasive in all of our conversations - everything driven by risk and security - energy, minerals, nutrient supplies)
Emergent term of ‘security economics’ changing market dynamics. ‘No transition without justice’ not simply a slogan, it’s important to be able to find a way forward (e.g. UBI or ‘universal basic nutrition’ experiments)
Inequality and loss of solidarity
Hugh interest rate environment - inflationary economic context. Going to see more shocks to the economic system.
Difficult to price the material economy because of volatility.
Systems Practitioners shouldn’t use ‘community’ as too entangled. Be careful about language we’re giving power to.
Having to think about the constraints in the innovation landscape. Materially affecting our reality: UK can afford to build 14,000/year according to Paris Agreement carbon budget. Labour government has promised to build 350,000/year. Need to do things differently - open up new pathways (right to homes).
Persisting with illusions of infinite supply - instead we need to look at constraints because that’s where the innovation is.
Far right give you a meme to help you understand reality - they hijack a pattern analysis.
Scale of the shift - only 7.2% of global economy is ‘circular’ and it’s declining. Need fundamental shifts in material economy.
Volatility in the system massively increasing - energy costs, food costs
New Allies - central banks, security services, intergenerational wealth, civil society. Need to have representatives from these types of organisations at this conference. New theories about asset ownership.
Westminster living in synthetic domain. Everyday politics to what we’re observing.
“Systems is about conversation not communication.” This means we can deal with more information than previously thought.
“Pre-emptive peace strikes” in places where there’s risk of systemic volatility.
Risk to whom? Rooted in assets and value, rooted in monetary frameworks. Preservation of power.
Uncrystalised risk in the system. If you put the risks on the balance sheets, the organisations aren’t solvent anymore. No longer viable. Collision and corruption therefore becomes a systemic risk - interested in survival.
(e.g. of Kristallnacht and insurance companies not paying for broken windows but instead paying ‘force majeure’ money to Nazi Party)
Explosion of sovereignties - more of an agentified world view. People don’t ‘assign’ their sovereignty to the state as they did in the past. Multitude of sovereignties.
Need to work beyond democratic renewal systems - legitimacy? “States are not the public”
Systems scaffolding - who owns the solution for portfolio (unless the system wants to implement, just remain as sticky notes). Need to work as system capabilities level.
Trans-systems work. Structural systems transformation.
Constraints - key shifter of innovation space.
‘Trap’ of the system boundary and the other. Need to build new language. Different dynamics to bounded models.
Systemic gap in price and value. Unpriced value in the system - going to be something that organised a lot of systems work (e.g. looking at single food product or wider systems level)
Deep Code failure at systems level. Language probel - use old world language which traps us. Also ‘property rights’ like to be challenged.
[Dark Matter iceberg graphic]
Building compound learning organisations and systems. Freedom and agency must lie in the actor for a system to be a system. That means learning. How do we build these?
Chief Learning Officers instead of CEOs. Coherence is formed not around risk but about capacity to learn. Higher overheads, but higher resilience and innovation capacities.
Crisis-driven system transitions. We’re going to live in a world where crises shatter Overton Windows. Emerging Theory of Change.
Big challenge is legitimacy. Mountains over mountains.
Single-point optimisation doesn’t work for an entangled planet. Need to focus on multi-point optimisation.
Multi-organisation organising. Contracting and coordination makes that difficult - what are the frameworks here?
Difficult for states to impose transition, needs to be negotiated.
System financing, structured economic systems, and para-colonizing financial capital. How do you move capital through a non-colonial lens? Capital is an extension of the dominion theory of the world.
‘System accelerators’
Intermediary agent-trust economy. How to build a different way to finance things. Turning energy meter into financial instrument? Public interest micro-trusts. Way of regulating the translation space. Weak signal.
Relationship with material economy - borrowing, not owning.
Freedom and systems - we need to build capacity for agents to be free (not in terms of market choice, but free in terms of being radically human). People and institutions feel trapped. Combined with volatility and uncertainty this creates fear.
First movers - food, material economy
We’re trying to make stuff circular that shouldn’t be. Biomaterial level? Needs to interact with nutrition system. Also river systems work (key fragility point)
Dark Matter Labs has new publication about portfolios - who owns them? New ways of organising to deal with portfolio allocation.
Problem of having the incumbents in the room when we’re talking about system transitions. 40% of the people who this issue will affect aren’t even born. Might be worth having empty seats to recognise this?
We don’t have data infrastructure - cities can’t calculate carbon emissions. Can’t just be ‘open data’ as requires security.
Operating in a deep war of values - e.g. billionaires willing to throw money at throttling the human race because they think this is the answer. Accelerating towards a ‘throttling event’. Very different perspectives on the table.
Our own governance - need integrity. Systemic question.
Financing the deep work - real issue, end up talking about surface level.
How do we move from communities of care based on fear (i.e. the far right) to communities of care based on love?
I’ve read some of the thoughts in this post via Low-Tech Magazine especially around the DC/AC/DC conversion being pointlessly lossy. However, this is the first I’ve read of being able to use excess solar power to create other forms of energy.
[S]olar deployment is accelerating at breathtaking speed. Most of the world’s solar power was installed in the past 30 months. In fact, China installed more solar in 2023 than the US has installed in history.
In the UK in 2024, I can go online and buy a solar panel with the same dimensions as a fence panel, for only double the cost. In five years, the cost of solar will have halved again.
[…]
Solar will saturate the power grid, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll stop building it. It just means that we’ll use it off-grid.
[…]
The cost of solar energy in a sunny place is trending towards virtually-free.
This is solar’s opportunity to not just displace electricity supply, but also primary energy supply. Rather than simply supplying energy in the form it’s consumed (electricity), intermittent solar is so fricking cheap that it could manipulate atoms into fuels for subsequent consumption.
We’re talking about using solar to create synthetic kerosene for planes, clean ammonia for fertiliser, clean methanol for shipping, and maybe even synthetic natural gas for general purpose use.
These synthetic and ‘green’ fuels all rely on green hydrogen as a base ingredient. Green hydrogen is extraordinarily expensive to produce, and the only cost-competitive way to make it is off-grid solar.
[…]
Taking solar off the grid also has a few other major cost advantages. If you are ripping solar straight into a DC application, you can skip the costs and efficiency losses of inverting that power into AC. If you lose most of the balance of plant, power electronics, and the paperwork of a grid connection, you’re getting really cheap and fast.
Source: Ben James
After discovering this site earlier in the week, I’ve shown it to my wife and my mother. I’m interested in the results, because they’re the two people in my life that I’ve most disagreed with when it comes to the question “what colour is that?”
It turns out that, when it comes to the blue-green continuum, my wife isn’t so far away from me. But my mother? According to her, something isn’t “blue” unless it’s very blue. Fascinating from a phenomenology-in-practice point of view.
Source: ismy.blue
Although there’s plenty of people who would say otherwise, I think we’re in an antediluvian period with LLMs. We’re not seeing ads inserted or intentional misinformation being spread through mainstream offerings.
It won’t be long, though, and weak signals like this give us a glimpse of the future.
This study examines the impact of AI on human false memories–recollections of events that did not occur or deviate from actual occurrences. It explores false memory induction through suggestive questioning in Human-AI interactions, simulating crime witness interviews. Four conditions were tested: control, survey-based, pre-scripted chatbot, and generative chatbot using a large language model (LLM). Participants (N=200) watched a crime video, then interacted with their assigned AI interviewer or survey, answering questions including five misleading ones. False memories were assessed immediately and after one week. Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users' responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction. After one week, the number of false memories induced by generative chatbots remained constant. However, confidence in these false memories remained higher than the control after one week. Moderating factors were explored: users who were less familiar with chatbots but more familiar with AI technology, and more interested in crime investigations, were more susceptible to false memories. These findings highlight the potential risks of using advanced AI in sensitive contexts, like police interviews, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations.
Source: MIT Media Lab
I enjoyed this rant that starts off talking about shaving being too expensive, and ends by giving examples of things that have replaced other things, and are worse.
(FWIW I’ve found that Bulldog razors seem to last a lot longer than other cartridge-based options)
So, does this matter? I assume that for most of the people reading this, the sums of money involved may seem pretty trivial. But I think the changes in the razor market are obviously bad, and reflect similar changes that can be seen in many other markets. We see new products launched which promise minor benefits in convenience, and which crowd out older, cheaper, and better products. Those older products are deliberately marginalised, and more money is captured from consumers without them really gaining any value from their expenditure.
[…]
Tea bags replace loose leaf tea. Allows for lower quality tea to be sold, diminishes the re-use of tea leaves. Also ludicrous product differentiation along the lines of ‘we have a special shaped tea bag’.
[…]
Subscription services like Hello Fresh, where you can pay well over the odds to have some vegetables delivered to you.
Source: John’s blog
I just saw that Tom Critchlow has taken a job, which is surprising given how much he waxed lyrical about the independent life. That post took me to one he wrote earlier this year about being useful rather than giving advice.
Giving advice starting with “you should…” is problematic, as I think we all come to learn through experience in both our personal and professional lives. It assumes you have all of the context, which is almost never true. Instead, pointing out “opportunities to…” is a much better framing.
Otherwise, as a consultant you’re telling them to do the very thing they don’t have the capacity to do. You’re telling them to draw the rest of the owl in the meme.
After all, it’s rare that a client doesn’t know have any clue what they need to do. Usually, in my experience at least, they need help choosing between options, and then capacity-building to get there.
Giving advice is an intensely personal thing. The feeling of learning something new sits right next to the feeling of shame for not knowing it in the first place. And worse, in the client/consultant relationship, the client is at least partially complicit in the situation when they come to you.
[…]
Giving advice is fraught even if the problem is well defined and you do know the answer. So when you’re working on strategic, ill-defined projects where there isn’t a right answer - giving advice is incredibly delicate, and in some cases not even possible.
So if you’re asking “You should…” to the client, stop and examine if you’ve properly defined the situation and provided evidence for the problem, to help the client deeply internalize the problem and win over the necessary stakeholders before you propose any kind of solution.
[…]
“There is an opportunity to…” This phrase is the key - it places the focus correctly on first defining the problem - and then providing evidence - before focusing on the solution. It allows us to articulate and quantify the opportunity while leaving room for the client to have say over resource allocation, for the client to shape the solution and for the client to determine prioritization and timing.
[…]
This all builds up to my personal consulting mantra: always work on the next most useful thing.
This mantra helps remind me that consulting isn’t about being right, it’s about being useful.
[…]
Always work on the next most useful thing. And that doesn’t always involve doing what the client asked for.
Source: Tom Critchlow
I was pretty amazed that Team Belshaw already does at least 75 of these 100 tips to sort your life out. Here are three that I personally don’t currently do, but which I might start doing.
- Carry ‘vex money’ Always carry enough cash to get you out of danger or trouble if other methods fail – a taxi fare at least.
[…]
- Try coffee planking “Every morning I get up and make coffee for my wife and me. One cup takes one minute 18 seconds to brew, and every morning for the last 12 months I have planked for this period. Simple thing, using the dead time.” Anonymous reader
[…]
- Keep track of praise and thanks Reader Sarah, who works as a teacher, keeps every thank-you card she has ever been given: “When I’ve had a rough day at school, I flick through them to remember some of the lives I have had an impact on.” Another reader, Lewis, saves positive messages about himself: “When times are tough or I’m feeling down, I dig through it and remind myself of the good things people have shared with me over the years.”
Source: The Guardian
We have satellite imagery of pretty much every area of land on Earth. This is known as ‘LandSat’ and this website allows you to spell out your name, or any other word, using rivers and other geographical features!
Source: Camp LandSat
I haven’t actually finished listening to the whole episode yet, but I can already highly recommend this conversation between Adam Grant and Trevor Noah.
The conversation they have about context towards the start is so important that I wish everyone I know would listen to it.
Trevor Noah is widely admired for his quick wit. He’s hosted The Daily Show and the Grammy Awards, sold out huge arenas around the world, had numerous hit comedy specials on Netflix, and published a bestselling memoir, Born a Crime. One of the keys to his success is his ability to read people and communicate clearly. In a lively discussion with Adam, Trevor dives into the importance of context in everything from personal relationships to global politics. The two also debate the best way to improve American politics — and Trevor does a few impromptu impressions, including one of Adam.
Source: WorkLife with Adam Grant
Although there are some positive use cases, one of the most toxic things about X/Twitter has been the ‘dogpiling’ that happens as a result of someone quote-posting something to their followers.
So much so, in fact, that Mastodon has long-resisted implementing them at all, although there are some workarounds in various Fediverse apps.
It’s fantastic to see, therefore, that Bluesky, a federated social network that runs on a different protocol to Mastodon, seems to have found a way to allow for non-toxic quote-posting.
(Since Elon Musk refused to comply with Brazilian law leading to X being blocked there, half a million new accounts have been created on Bluesky. Also, lots of people who I recognise from OG Twitter have started following me this week, which would suggest some form of tipping point…)
As of the latest app version, released today (version 1.90), users can view all the quote posts on a given post. Paired with that, you can detach your original post from someone’s quote post.
This helps you maintain control over a thread you started, ideally limiting dog-piling and other forms of harassment. On the other hand, quote posts are often used to correct misinformation too. To address this, we’re leaning into labeling services and hoping to integrate a Community Notes-like feature in the future.
Source: Bluesky blog
I don’t know about you, but responding to a family member, friend, or professional contact using a meme has been a daily event for a long time now. It’s now over 12 years since I gave my meme-laden talk at TEDx Warwick based on my doctoral thesis. A year later, I gave a presentation (in the midst of growing a beard for charity) which used nothing but gifs. But I digress.
This article from New Public gives a typology of meme-sharing, which is useful. One of the things I wish I had realised, because looking back with hindsight it’s so obvious, is the way that memes can be weaponised to create in-groups and out-groups, and to perpetuate hate. Not that I could have done much about it.
There are at least three types of connections that can be forged through meme-sharing: bonding over a shared interest such as movies, sports, and more; bonding over an experience or circumstance; or bonding over a feeling or personal sentiment.
[…]
Sharing memes to connect over common interests is perhaps the most surface-level form of meme-sharing. It hinges exclusively on having shared cultural references rather than shared personal commonalities. These exchanges are more likely to occur in established relationships, such as among family and friends that have shared lived experiences and therefore are exposed to the same cultural references and social cues.
[…]
Connecting over a shared interest can be like connecting over a single data point. But people are so much more complicated. That is why connecting over experiences, which are often inherently more rich and embedded with memories and emotion, can yield a more powerful connection.
[…]
Connecting over shared feelings can be even more moving. There is something particularly intimate about connecting over emotions, and at the same time, universal. As humans, we are rarely self-aware of all of our internal thoughts and feelings, so a meme that can connect with them unexpectedly, like the one below (sound on!), can be powerful.
[…]
These three ways of forming connection through meme-sharing are of course not mutually exclusive, and they are far from being collectively exhaustive. There are definitely instances of meme-sharing which accomplish all of these…
And there can also be situations in which people share memes for reasons outside of connecting over identity, experience, or feelings. Rather, what this typology illustrates is the ways that we can (and do!) cultivate belonging with others online through the sharing of comedic imagery.
Source: New Public
Image: Know Your Meme
Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi have published a report on Fediverse governance which is the kind of thing I would have read with relish when I was Product Manager of MoodleNet. And even before then when I was presenting on decentralisation and censorship in the midst of the ‘illegal’ Catalan independence referendum.
These days, while still interested in this kind of stuff, and in particular in [how misinformation might be countered in decentralised networks]9bonfirenetworks.org/posts/zap…) I’m not going to be reading 40,000 words on the subject (PDF). Instead point others to it, and in particular to six-page ‘quick start’ guide for those who might be new to the idea of federated governance.
I wouldn’t have guessed, going in, that we’d end up with the major structural categories we landed on—moderation, server leadership, and federated diplomacy—but after spending so much time eyeball-deep in interview transcripts, I think it’s a pretty reasonable structure for discussing the big picture of governance. (The real gold is of course in the excerpts and summaries from our participants, who continuously challenged and surprised us.)
There are no manifestos to be found here, except in that our participants often eloquently and sometimes passionately express their hopes for the fediverse. There are a lot of assumptions, most of which we’ve tried to be pretty scrupulous about calling out in the text, but anything this chunky contains plentiful grist for both principled disagreement and the other kind. Our aim is to describe and convey the knowledge inherent in fediverse server teams, so we’ve really stuck close to the kinds of problems, risks, needs, and challenges those folks expressed.
Source: Erin Kissane
Image: Google Deepmind
To be a professional, a knowledge worker in the 21st century, means keeping up with jargon, acronyms, and shifts in terminology. Some of this is necessary, as I’ve explained in my work on ambiguity, some isn’t.
This article by Kristine Chompff on the Edalex blog introduces a term new to me: “life-ready signals”. It doesn’t seem to me destined to catch-on, any more than ‘durable skills’ has or will, but is nevertheless a worthy attempt to recognise the behaviours that go around hard skills and knowledge.
I also think that we need to do something about the acronym soup: while I might understand someone saying that we use RSDs to build a VC as part of a learner’s PER within an LER ecosystem, it’s gobbledegook to everyone else.
For anyone interested in this kind of thing, we have a community of practice called Open Recognition is for Everybody (ORE) which you can discover and join at badges.community)
For us to understand life-ready signals, we must for a second talk about semiotics and the definition of terms. Because the term “life-ready skills” has evolved, so has the term “life-ready signals.”
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, of which language is a part. It depends partly on the object being described, but also on the way the person reading that description interprets it. For these terms to be meaningful, we all need to interpret them in the same way.
Life-ready skills are the thing being described. Life-ready signals are those “signs” being used to describe them. For a learner to tell their own story, they need to be equipped not only with the skills themselves, but the proper “signs” to share them with others in a meaningful way.
It’s also important to note here that with the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) there will always be skills that machines will never master, and those are the life-ready skills we are discussing here.
Source: Edalex blog
Image: Giulia May
This is such a great article by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. Quoting philosophers, he concisely summarises the difficulty of parenting, examines some of the tensions, and settles on a position with which I’d agree.
It’s such a hard thing to do, especially with your first child, that I’m amazed there’s not some kind of mandatory classes. The hardest bit isn’t even the dealing with a new helpless infant, but the changes that kids go through on the road to adulthood. While we all went through them from the inside, trying to understand and help from the outside (while dealing with your own issues) is so difficult.
The fact that children are their own people can come as a surprise to parents. This is partly because young kids are so hopelessly dependent, but it also reflects how we think about parenthood… We talk as though having children is mainly “a matter of inclination, of personal desire, of appetite,” the philosopher Mara van der Lugt writes, in “Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?” She sees this as totally backward… Having children, van der Lugt argues, might be best seen as “a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible.” We are deciding “that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted,” and we “must be prepared, at any point, to be held accountable for their creation.”
[…]
Van der Lugt is not pronatalist, but she isn’t anti-natalist, either. Her contention is simply that we should confront these questions more directly. Typically, she observes, it’s people who don’t want kids who are asked to explain themselves. Maybe it should work the other way, so that, when someone says that they want kids, people ask, “Why?”
[…]
In a 2014 book, “Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships,” the philosopher Harry Brighouse and the political theorist Adam Swift ask how we might relate to our children if we understand them, from the beginning of their lives, as independent individuals. There’s a tension, they write, between the ideals of a liberal society and the widely held “proprietarian view” of children: “The idea that children in some sense belong to their parents continues to influence many who reject the once-common view that wives belong to their husbands,” they note. But what’s the alternative? What would a family look like if the fundamental separateness of children was taken for granted, even during the years when they depend on us the most?
[…]
If the relationship between parents and children is based not on the proprietary “ownership” of kids by their parents but on the right of children to a certain kind of upbringing, then it makes sense to ask what parents must do to satisfy that right—and, conversely, what’s irrelevant to satisfying it. Brighouse and Swift, after pushing and prodding their ideas in various ways, conclude that their version of the family is a little less dynastic than usual. Some people, for instance, think that parents are entitled to do everything they can to give their children advantages in life. But, as the authors see it, some ways of seeking to advantage your children—from leaving them inheritances to paying for élite schooling—are not part of the bundle of “familial relationship goods” to which kids have a right; in fact, confusing these transactional acts for those goods—love, presence, moral tutelage, and so on—would be a mistake. This isn’t to say that parents mustn’t give their kids huge inheritances or send them to private schools. But it is to say that, if the government decides to raise the inheritance tax, it isn’t interfering with some sacred parental right.
[…]
“The basic point is simple,” they write. “Children are separate people, with their own lives to lead, and the right to make, and act on, their own judgments about how they are to live those lives. They are not the property of their parents.”
Source: The New Yorker
(use Archive Buttons if you can’t get access}
This is an interesting article by Justine Tunney who argues that Open Source developers are having their contributions erased from history by LLMs. It’s interesting to consider this by field, as LLMs seem to have no problem explaining accurately what I’m known for (digital literacies, etc.)
As Tunney points out, the world of Open Source is a gift economy. But if we’re gifting things to something ingesting everything indiscriminately and then regurgitating in a way that erases authorship, is that problematic?
In a world of infinite automation and infinite surveillance, survival is going to depend on being the least boring person. Over my career I’ve written and attached my name to thousands of public source code files. I know they are being scraped from the web and used to train AIs. But if I ask something like Claude, “what sort of code has Justine Tunney wrote?” it hasn’t got the faintest idea. Instead it thinks I’m a political activist, since it feels no guilt remembering that I attended a protest on Wall Street 13 years ago. But all of the positive things I’ve contributed to society? Gifts I took risks and made great personal sacrifices to give? It’d be the same as if I sat my hands.
I suspect what happens is the people who train AI models treat open source authorship information as PII [Personally Identifiable Information]. When assembling their datasets, there are many programs you can find on GitHub for doing this, such as presidio which is a tool made by Microsoft to scrub knowledge of people from the data they collect. So when AIs are trained on my code, they don’t consider my git metadata, they don’t consider my copyright comments; they just want the wisdom and alpha my code contains, and not the story of the people who wrote it. When the World Wide Web was first introduced to the public in the 90’s, consumers primarily used it for porn, and while things have changed, the collective mindset and policymaking are still stuck in that era. Tech companies do such a great job protecting privacy that they’ll erase us from the book of life in the process.
Is this the future we want? Imagine if Isaac Newton’s name was erased, but the calculus textbooks remained. If we dehumanize knowledge in this manner, then we risk breaking one of the fundamental pillars that’s enabled science and technology to work in our society these last 500 years. I’ve yet to meet a scientist, aside from maybe Satoshi Nakamoto, who prefers to publish papers anonymously. I’m not sure if I would have gotten into coding when I was a child if I couldn’t have role models like Linus Torvalds to respect. He helped me get where I am today, breathing vibrant life into the digital form of a new kind of child. So if these AIs like Claude are learning from my code, then what I want is for Claude to know and remember that I helped it. This is actually required by the ISC license.
Source: justine’s web page
Image: Marcus Spiske
If any government is going of, by, and for the people, then we can’t have unaccountable black box algorithms making important decisions. This is a welcome move.
Source: The Guardian
Artificial intelligence and algorithmic tools used by central government are to be published on a public register after warnings they can contain “entrenched” racism and bias.
Officials confirmed this weekend that tools challenged by campaigners over alleged secrecy and a risk of bias will be named shortly. The technology has been used for a range of purposes, from trying to detect sham marriages to rooting out fraud and error in benefit claims.
[…]
In August 2020, the Home Office agreed to stop using a computer algorithm to help sort visa applications after it was claimed it contained “entrenched racism and bias”. Officials suspended the algorithm after a legal challenge by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and the digital rights group Foxglove.
It was claimed by Foxglove that some nationalities were automatically given a “red” traffic-light risk score, and those people were more likely to be denied a visa. It said the process amounted to racial discrimination.
[…]
Departments are likely to face further calls to reveal more details on how their AI systems work and the measures taken to reduce the risk of bias. The DWP is using AI to detect potential fraud in advance claims for universal credit, and has more in development to detect fraud in other areas.
Alexandra Samuel points out in this newsletter that a lot of the work we do as knowledge workers will increasingly be ‘meta-work’. Introducing a 7-step approach, she first of all outlines why it’s necessary, especially in a ‘neurovarious’ world.
I think this is a really important article, and hits the sweet spot between AI literacy, systems thinking, and working openly. One to bookmark, for sure.
In the AI era, knowledge production will increasingly get done by machines—which means that the meta-work of choosing tools and processes is not just the work that remains for humans, but the most valuable kind of work you can do. Meta-work is how we get past all the one-size-fits-none approaches that have cursed us with overload and overwhelm, because we’re trying to work in a way that doesn’t don’t account for the vast differences in how each of us thinks, perceives, and communicates.
When we get overwhelmed by our tasks or stuck in our writing or thinking, it is often because we need to do some meta-work.
[…]
The more deeply I dive into the world of neurovariety—the functional differences in how workers think, perceive and communicate—the more I see that effective meta-work depends on understanding your own particular thinking, perception and communication style.
Meta-work requires you to think about how you build and create knowledge, to consider where you truly add value to your organization or to the world, and to recognize that there is no right answer to any of these questions—just the closest answer you can find for yourself, right now.
Source: Thrive at Work
Google’s new Pixel 9 smartphones are being heavily marketed as having their AI tool, Gemini , onboard. One of the things this allows you to do is to use a tool called ‘Reimagine’ that allows you to add new things to a scene simply via a text prompt.
It’s getting easier and easier to create realistic versions of events which never really happened. In the example above, they circumvented the cursory safeguards to simulate an accident. Fun times.
Reimagine is a logical extension of last year’s Magic Editor tools, which let you select and erase parts of a scene or change the sky to look like a sunset. It was nothing shocking. But Reimagine doesn’t just take it a step further — it kicks the whole door down. You can select any nonhuman object or portion of a scene and type in a text prompt to generate something in that space. The results are often very convincing and even uncanny. The lighting, shadows, and perspective usually match the original photo. You can add fun stuff, sure, like wildflowers or rainbows or whatever. But that’s not the problem.
A couple of my colleagues helped me test the boundaries of Reimagine with their Pixel 9 and 9 Pro review units, and we got it to generate some very disturbing things. Some of this required some creative prompting to work around the obvious guardrails; if you choose your words carefully, you can get it to create a reasonably convincing body under a blood-stained sheet.
In our week of testing, we added car wrecks, smoking bombs in public places, sheets that appear to cover bloody corpses, and drug paraphernalia to images. That seems bad. As a reminder, this isn’t some piece of specialized software we went out of our way to use — it’s all built into a phone that my dad could walk into Verizon and buy.
Source: The Verge
My son enjoys playing GeoGuessr, which is “a geography game, in which you are dropped somewhere in the world in a street view panorama and your mission is to find clues and guess your location on the world map”.
Some people are incredibly good at it, and can identify places within seconds. They use clues such as shadows, streetlights, and even the colour of soil or sand.
Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group specialising in “fact-checking and open-source intelligence” has released a tool to help figure out the location of images or video for more serious purposes. This is particularly important in a world of misinformation.
Geolocation is often a time-consuming task.
Researchers often spend hours poring over photos, scouring satellite images and sifting through street view.
But what if there was another way to quickly narrow down your search area?
Bellingcat’s new Shadow Finder Tool, developed with our Discord community, helps you quickly narrow down where an image was taken, by reducing your search area from the entire globe to just a handful of countries and locations.
Source: Bellingcat
Tool: Shadow Finder
I mean, yes, of course I knew that data files are stored on servers and that those servers consume electricity. But this is a good example of reframing. How many emails have I got stored that I will never look at again? How many files stored in the cloud ‘just in case’?
Multiply that by millions (and billions) of internet users and we’ve got… a climate-relevant issue.
When “I can has cheezburger?” became one of the first internet memes to blow our minds, it’s unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up.
But research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data”, meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family – from “All your base are belong to us”, through Ryan Gosling saying “Hey Girl”, to Tim Walz with a piglet – are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacentres will account for just under 6% of the UK’s total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis.
[…]
One funny meme isn’t going to destroy the planet, of course, but the millions stored, unused, in people’s camera rolls does have an impact, he explained: “The one picture isn’t going to make a drastic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption.”
Cloud operators and tech companies have a financial incentive to stop people from deleting junk data, as the more data that is stored, the more people pay to use their systems. “There are maybe other big contributors to [greenhouse gas] emissions, which maybe haven’t been picked up. And we would certainly argue that data is one of those and it will grow and get bigger, particularly think about that huge explosion but also, we know through forecasts that in the next year to two, if we take all the renewable energy in the world, that wouldn’t be enough to accommodate the amount of energy data requires. So that’s quite a scary thought.”
Source: The Guardian
Image: Nyan Cat
I definitely agree with the author of this post that there a couple of wonderful things about reading history. First, you realise that almost everyone in the past had it much harder than you do, which puts things in perspective. Second, you realise that there’s many and varied ways to live a happy and/or flourishing life.
In addition, the passing comment about credentials not mattering when people realise you’re obsessive enough about a certain area is probably an insight worth unpacking.
Most of my friends have life paths that go something like this: they got ruinously obsessed with something to the exclusion of everything else and then worked on it. And eventually that failed or succeeded and then they got ruinously obsessed with something else and started working on that. And it turns out that if you’re obsessive enough the credentials thing sort of goes away because people are just like, oh, you’re clearly competent and bizarrely knowledgeable about this thing you’re obsessed with, I want to help you work on it.
If you operate like this way you end up with a weird life because in a conventional career path there are all these rules and customs you’re supposed to follow, like you’re supposed to major in W in undergrad and get X internship and then go to Y for grad school and then work at Z. The truth is, most of the people I know are just too ADHD or impatient or unconventional to follow the path that’s expected of them. They may not have even been aware of what the “normal” thing to do was. And I’m certainly not recommending that or glamorizing it because rules and customs exist for a reason, they are necessarily useful. But it’s helpful to know that some people end up fine even when they don’t do the normal thing.
Something I wish someone had told me as a kid is that the only real “rule” for work is that you have to be able pay your rent and not hurt anyone and not break any laws. And within those confines you can do literally anything, hopefully something you find personally fulfilling.
[…]
Reading history is useful partially because it makes you understand how varied people’s lives really are. The artists I admire have had lives that included nervous breakdowns and fleeing countries because of war and leaving their wife in another continent and writing their first novel to pay off gambling debts. That helps me remember that there is no such thing as a life that makes sense, or at least that’s not something I need to aspire to.
Source: bookbear express
Image: Derick McKinney
If you use the Google Calendar app in ‘schedule’ view, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the automatic illustrations added for some events. While looking for a way to stop it showing an American Football instead of a ‘soccer’ ball, I came across a list of all of the different kinds of ways you can trigger the illustrations.
Those illustrations are triggered by the presence of certain codewords within your event titles. And once you know what codewords cause what illustrations to appear, you can hack the system, in a sense, and make any event in your agenda stand out with a specific illustration around it.
Source: The Intelligence
(someone’s also created a GitHub repo)
It’s always puzzled me when people drink huge amounts of water. Whether it’s for ‘detox’ reasons, as part of a diet, or something else, it always seems to be tinged with a bit of moral showboating.
I do a fair amount of exercise. I drink water with some BCAA powder in it when I do. Other than that, I have a couple of cups of tea a day and water with my meals. Turns out, this is probably the right approach.
It is a common belief that you have to drink 6-8 glasses of water per day. Almost everyone has heard this recommendation at some point although if you were to ask someone why you need to drink this much water every day, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. There is usually some vague idea that you need to drink water to flush toxins out of your system. Perhaps someone will suggest that drinking water is good for your kidneys since they filter the blood and regulate water balance. Unfortunately, none of these ideas is quite true and the 6-8 glasses myth comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of some basic physiology.
[…]
You will always lose water vapour in your breath, provided you keep breathing, and you will always produce… watery-odour free sweat even if you move to the Arctic. Of course, if you move to the tropics you will produce much more sweat to compensate for the extra heat. But all told, roughly 1.5-2 litres of water loss are obligatory losses that we cannot do anything about. Those who exercise, live in hot climates or have a fever will obviously lose more water because of more sweating. Thus, a human being needs to replenish the roughly 2 litres of water they lose every day from sweating, breathing, and urination. The actual notion of 8 glasses a day originates from a 1945 US Food and Nutrition Board which recommended 2.5 litres of daily water intake. But what is generally forgotten from this recommendation is, firstly, that it was not based on any research and that secondly the recommendation stated that most of the water intake could come from food sources.
All food has some water in it, although obviously fresh juicy fruits will have more than, say, a box of raisins. Suffice it to say that by eating regular food and having coffee, juice or what have you, you will end up consuming 2 litres of water without having to go seek it out specifically. If you find yourself in a water deficit, your body has a very simple mechanism for letting you know. Put simply, you will get thirsty.
If you are thirsty, drink water. If you are not thirsty, then you do not need to go out and purposefully drink 6-8 glasses of water a day since you will probably get all the water in your regular diet. One important caveat to remember though is that on hot summer days, your water losses from sweating go up and if you plan to spend some time out doors, having water with you is important to avoid dehydration and heat stroke. While the thirst reflex is pretty reliable, it does tend to fade with age and older people are more likely to become dehydrated without realizing it. Thus, the take home message is drink water when you are thirsty, but on very hot days it might not be a bad idea to stay ahead of the curve and keep hydrated.
Christina Hendricks is a Professor of Teaching in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver. In this post she reflects on a session run by fellow Canadian and open educator, Dave Cormier, in which he discussed ‘messy’ situations where we’re not sure what should be done.
The solution suggested seems to be to ‘tug’ things in a particular direction based on your values. I’d argue for a different, more systemic approach, given what I’ve learned so far through my MSc. What you need when confronted with a messy, problematic situation are boundaries, holistic thinking, and multiple perspectives.
I really appreciated where Dave landed in his presentation: rather than only feeling stuck, suspended, we can consult our values and make a move based on those, we can tug the rope in a tug of war in the direction of our values and work to move things from there. The focus on values is key here: ask yourself what are your values as they relate to this situation, and make decisions and act based on those, knowing that’s enough in uncertain situations. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t revisit your values and how they apply to the situation if either of those things changes, but that it’s a landing place and it’s solid enough for the moment. He talked about how we can have conversations with students and others about why we would do something in a particular situation, rather than what the right answer is, focusing on the values that are moving us.
To do so requires that we are clear about what our values are, which is in some cases more easily said than done. This is something near and dear to my heart as a philosopher, as trying to distill what is underlying our views and our decisions, what kinds of reasons and values, is part of our bread and butter.
[…]
[W]hat if we thought about complex issues and structures more like flexible webs? (Which is an image that reminds me of other of Dave Cormier’s work such as that on rhizomatic learning.) So that if you tug on one part it can still move and the other parts will move as well (or break I suppose, which in some cases may not be a bad thing).
Source: You’re The Teacher
Image: David Ellis (CC BY-NC-ND)
Deciding that you want to do something and then asking for advice is different to asking for permission. In general, permission-seeking behaviour in adults is a sign of weakness, even in hierarchical organisations. It’s either a sign of personal weakness, or if there are consequences for acting with authority in your domain of influence, then it’s a sign of organisational weakness.
One of the most common anti-patterns I see that can create conflict in an otherwise collaborative environment is people asking for permission instead of advice. This is such an insidious practice that it not only sounds reasonable, it actually sounds like the right thing to do: “Hey, I was thinking about doing X, would you be on board with that?”
Advice… is easy. “Hey, I was thinking about doing X, what advice would you give me on that?” In this instance you are showing a lot of respect to the person you are asking but not saddling them with responsibility because the decision is still on you. Your obvious goal with this approach is to do the best you can, so they are going to trust you aren’t hiding any gritty details and therefore aren’t going to waste time second guessing your premises. They are going to feel comfortable giving you all their honest feedback knowing the responsibility lies with you, and your ego will remain intact because you invited the criticism on yourself directly.
Source: boz
Image: Mark König
I recently struggled with the middle of a book which I really wanted to finish by an author I really like. The chapters were too long for its subject matter, and I gave up.
Contrast that with The Road which is quite the harrowing read at times but, as this article points out, doesn’t have any chapters at all. I completed that without any problem. Other books, like the Reacher series, have quite short chapters. The trick, it seems, is to have chapter, or at least some kind of gaps to give readers a break, at times which are appropriate.
With our phones offering us immediate dopamine, books now have to work harder to keep us engaged. ‘Busy-ness’ has become an increasing distraction, through work and parenting as well as social media. That’s why you may have noticed shorter chapters in more recent books, especially ones aimed at readers of millennial age and below (that’s pretty much everyone under forty).
As any writer will find, however, there is no magic button when it comes to chapter length: the ‘right’ one is a blend for each novel being written. There’s no point in worrying about the length of your piece of string if the string itself isn’t useful or compelling.
Source: Penguin
It’s been four years since I switched to the Susty theme for my WordPress-powered blog. Not long later, I also redesigned my home page to be less than 1kB (although it’s slightly more than that now).
Micro.blog, which I use to host Thought Shrapnel is terrible in this regard. Using Cloudflare’s URL Scan gave a ‘bytes transferred’ total of 12.24MB, which is 3,000 times larger than the 4.15kB for my home page, and 14 times larger than the 891.28kB (including images) for my WordPress-powered blog.
Minimising the size of your site is is not only a good idea from a sustainability point of view, but having a fast-loading website is just better for user experience and SEO. The extract below explains why having a site that is less than 14KB (compressed) is a good idea from a technical perspective.
Most web servers TCP slow start algorithm starts by sending 10 TCP packets.
The maximum size of a TCP packet is 1500 bytes.
This maximum is not set by the TCP specification, it comes from the ethernet standard
Each TCP packet uses 40 bytes in its header — 16 bytes for IP and an additional 24 bytes for TCP
That leaves 1460 bytes per TCP packet. 10 x 1460 = 14600 bytes or roughly 14kB!
So if you can fit your website — or the critical parts of it — into 14kB, you can save visitors a lot of time — the time it takes for one round trip between them and your website’s server.
Source: endtimes.dev
Image: Markus Spiske
Note: I’ve been away from here for just over a month, and my backlog is so huge that I can’t put off posting any longer!
I’ve said many times over the last few years to friends and family that I’ve achieved all that I want to in life. That, I think, makes it easier to ‘pursue things that don’t scale’ — but so does studying philosophy from my teenage years onwards.
This post talks about “doing things that don’t scale in pursuit of things that can’t scale” which is a great way of saying doing things that are human-scale. One of the examples given in this post is knitting, which cited in an article in The Guardian as being an example of the kinds of arts and crafts that promote wellbeing.
To some extent, of course, all of this is borne of maturity, of life experience, and of approaching and then reaching middle-age.
Chasing scale seems to be a kind of early life affliction. The more you chase it, the bigger the thing you chase gets. Perhaps it’s a natural desire to see how important we can be or at least how important our creations can be to the world (and hence how important we can be by proxy …). A desire to take on a seemingly insurmountable challenge, perhaps a noble one (though not always), and see if we can conquer it.
Yet without limits, we try to find them. This is true on many levels, whether it’s about how big we want our creations to become or how people should be able to lead their personal lives or how much candy kids can eat after a Halloween haul. But I think having no limits is unnatural. Chasing scale to the level we do is too. Whether we succeed or not, it stresses the system and inevitably burns us out.
Then a new motivation seems to surface, a desire to pursue something that can’t scale. See, my theory is that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale. The antidote to burnout and the existential inquiry it brings seems to be doing things that don’t scale in pursuit of things that can’t scale. It becomes exciting not to see what you can do without limits, but to see what you can do with them.
What are these pursuits that can’t scale? They could be skills, like archery or chess or cooking. They could be close relationships, like making friends. Maybe it’s building a truckload of IKEA furniture. Or maybe it’s starting a local small business. These pursuits could be considered hobbies or something more serious. It doesn’t matter so much what it is than that it has a clear and visible ceiling.
Source: Working Theorys
I can’t say I’ve ever read Roxanne Gay’s Work Friend column for The New York Times during the last four years, but I enjoyed reading her sign-off article. She talks about the advice she really wanted to give people (usually “quit your job”) and the things that we really want, but will never be able to get, from a job.
To work, for so many of us, is to want, want, want. To want to be happy at work. To feel useful and respected. To grow professionally and fulfill your ambitions. To be recognized as leaders. To be able to share what you believe with the people you’re around for eight or more hours a day. To be loyal and hope your employers will reciprocate. To be compensated fairly. To take time off to recharge and enjoy the fruits of your labor. To conquer the world. To do a good enough job and coast through middle age to retirement.
[…]
We shouldn’t have to suffer or work several jobs or tolerate intolerable conditions just to eke out a living, but a great many of us do just that. We feel trapped and helpless and sometimes desperate. We tolerate the intolerable because there is no choice. We ask questions for which we already know the answers because change is terrifying and we can’t really afford to risk the loss of income when rent is due and health insurance is tied to employment and someday we will have to stop working and will still have financial obligations.
I was mindful of these realities as I answered your Work Friend questions. Still, in my heart of hearts, I always wanted to tell you to quit your job. Negotiate for the salary you deserve. Stand up for yourself. Challenge authority. Tell your rude co-worker to shut up. Report your boss to everyone and anyone who will listen. Consult a lawyer. Did I mention quit your job? Go back to graduate school. Leave some deodorant and mouthwash on your smelly co-worker’s desk. Send that angry email to your undermining colleague. Call out your boss when he makes a wildly inappropriate comment. No, your boss should not force you to work out of her kitchen. Mind your own business about your colleague’s weird hobby. Mind your own business, in general. Blow the damn whistle on your employer’s cutting corners and putting people’s lives in danger. Tell the irresponsible dog owner to learn how to properly care for the dog. No, you don’t owe your employer anything beyond doing your job well in exchange for compensation. No, your company is not your family. No, the job will never, ever love you.
This is all to say that I wish we lived in a world where I could offer you frank, unfiltered professional advice, but I know we do not live in such a world.
Source: Goodbye, Work Friends
(use Archive Buttons if you can’t access directly)
Warren Ellis responds to a post by Jay Springett on ‘surface flatness’ by reframing the problem as… not one we have to worry about. It’s good advice: so long as you can sustain an income by not having to interact with online walled gardens, why care what other people do?
(I’m saying this slightly hesitantly, as I often do hand-wringing about the amount of disinformation on mainstream social networks and chat apps, but there’s not much I personally can do about it)
If you treat all those internet platforms as television, then you can turn them off and go for a walk on the internet instead. Structured hypertext products are still walled gardens, they’re just themed gardens, like a physic garden. The thing about walled gardens is that most people like them. They’re easy.
Jay has a point about the big platforms generally deprecating a lot of hypertext functions, as they lead people out of the walled gardens. But people like walled gardens. Even if they’re full of toxic plants, stinking blooms and corpse flowers. And besides: you have no more hope of imposing a new way of doing things on the internet than of preventing the BBC from commissioning any new programme with Michael McIntyre in it.
Leave ’em to it. Network tv isn’t all of broadcast culture, just as the big platforms aren’t all of internet culture, and all that shit is still hyperlinked. Leave the platforms to it. Go for a walk and report your notes.
Source: Warren Ellis
During my run yesterday morning, I listened to a great podcast episode about doing different things during the summer months. Now, as I wait to pick up my daughter from school in the driving rain it might not feel like summer here in the UK, but the advice is nonetheless spot-on.
In particular, I’ve taken the advice to do a bit of a digital detox and slow down a bit. So I’ve logged out of my Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn accounts, and will be back… mañana.
The summer months have a different flavour and feel to the other months of the year; there’s something different about our energy, motivation and willpower. And, if we can harness those differences, we have a golden opportunity to make meaningful changes that can have a transformative impact on our health, happiness and relationships and teach us things about ourselves that we previously did not know.
Source: Feel Better Live More
Image: Leone Venter
I’ve had this incredible interactive map, created by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, bookmarked for a while now. I’m never sure what to do with so much information in one place that isn’t primarily text-based.
I’m sharing it while still exploring it myself, with the hope that others will be able to find a use for it rather than be overwhelmed!
Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today.
[…]
Calculating Empires takes Donna Haraway’s provocation literally that we need to map the “informatics of domination.” The technologies of today are the latest manifestations of a long line of entangled systems of knowledge and control. This is the purpose of our visual genealogy: to show the complex interplay of systems of power, information, and circumstance across terrain and time, in order to imagine how things could be otherwise.
This work can never be complete: it is necessarily partial, subjective, and drawn from our own positionality. But that openness is part of the project. You are invited to read, reflect, and consider your own history in the recurring stories of calculation and empire. As the overwhelming now continues to unfold, Calculating Empires offers the possibility of looking back, in order to consider how different futures could be envisioned and realized.
Source: Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500
There’s a lot of money sloshing around at the top of society, being channeled into different schemes and offshore bank accounts. To enable this, there are a lot of bullshit jobs, including PR agencies spewing out credulous content.
Joan Westenberg was one of these people, until one day, she decided not to be. As she quotes Upton Sinclair as saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
One morning, I sat down at my desk to craft yet another press release touting yet another “game-changing” startup that had raised - yet another - $25 million. And I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d written something I believed in. The words that used to flow felt like trying to squeeze ancient toothpaste from an empty tube.
That was the day I cracked.
It wasn’t about the individual startups or the overhyped products. It was the whole damn ecosystem—if we can call it that. The inflated valuations, cult-like frat house “culture,” and the relentless, mindless pursuit of growth that comfortably glossed over the human cost of “disruption.”
Somewhere along the way, I’d allowed my writing—the thing that used to give me purpose—to be co-opted by the bullshit industrial complex. I’d convinced myself that I was part of something bigger, something world-changing. But deep down, in the quiet moments between pitch meetings and product launches, I knew better.
Source: Joan Westenberg
As I always say about misinformation and disinformation: people believe what they want to believe. So you don’t actually need very sophisticated ‘deepfakes’ for people to reshare fake content.
That being said, this article in The Guardian does a decent job of showing some ways of spotting deepfake content, along with some examples.
Look out for surplus fingers, compare mannerisms with real recordings and apply good old-fashioned common sense and scepticism, experts advise
In a crucial election year for the world, with the UK, US and France among the countries going to the polls, disinformation is swirling around social media.
There is much concern about deepfakes, or artificial intelligence-generated images or audio of leading political figures designed to mislead voters, and whether they will affect results.
They have not been a huge feature of the UK election so far, but there has been a steady supply of examples from around the world, including in the US where a presidential election looms.
Here are the visual elements to look out for.
Source: The Guardian
As I mentioned I’m reading Lifehouse by Adam Greenfield at the moment, which starts with some stark information about global heating. We need lots of workarounds to combat this, and some new material looks particularly promising.
This new textile could provide at least a little relief. It uses a process called radiative cooling, which describes how objects cool down by radiating thermal energy into their surroundings. Radiative cooling textiles do already exist, but most just reflect the sun’s heat. That “works very well if you’re in an open field,” says Po-Chun Hsu, a molecular engineering professor at the University of Chicago, whose team recently published a paper on their new material in the journal Science. But not in a city.
What those other fabrics don’t do is reflect the ambient heat coming from the street below or a nearby building. The heat coming directly from the sun’s rays and the heat emitted from a sun-baked street aren’t the same; they have different wavelengths. That means a material has to have two different “optical properties” to reflect both.
To do that, the researchers created a three-layer textile. The top layer is made of polymethylpentene or PMP, a type of plastic commonly used for packaging; the researchers had to figure out how to spin it into a fiber. The second is a sheet of silver nanowires, which acts like a mirror to reflect infrared radiation. Together, these block both the solar radiation and the ambient radiation reflected off of surfaces. The third layer can be any conventional fabric, like wool or cotton. Though there are multiple layers, the main thickness comes from the conventional fabric; the top layer is about 1/100th of a human hair.
In outdoor tests in Arizona, the textile stayed 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 degrees Celsius) cooler than “broadband emitter” fabrics used for outdoor sports, and 16 F (8.9 C) cooler than regular silk, a breathable fabric often used for dresses and shirts.
Along with clothing, the researchers say this cooling textile could be used on buildings, in cars, or even for food storage and shipping in order to lessen the need for refrigeration, which has a significant climate impact of its own. Next, Hsu’s team is collaborating with other teams to see how the textile could have a health benefit for those in extreme heat conditions.
Source: Fast Company
Maintaining “eye contact” with someone on a video conference call is a bit weird, because it necessitates looking directly into the camera. It’s important, though, otherwise it feels like the other person isn’t looking at you. And that impacts relationships - and, it seems, interpersonal evaluations.
The results indicate interviewers evaluate candidates more positively when their gaze is directed at the camera (i.e., CAM stimulus) compared to when the candidates look at the screen (SKW stimulus). The skewed-gaze stimulus received worse evaluation scores than voice-only presentation (VO stimulus).
Throughout an online interview, it is challenging to maintain “genuine” eye contact—making direct and meaningful visual connection with another person, but gazing into the camera can accomplish a similar feeling online as direct eye contact does in person.
While the evaluators overall preferred interviewees who maintained eye contact with the camera, an unconscious gender bias appeared. Female evaluators judged those with skewed downward gazes more harshly than male evaluators, and the difference in the evaluation of the CAM and SKW stimuli for female interviewees was larger than the male interviewees.
This gender bias within the study could be prevalent under non-experimental conditions. Making both interviewers and interviewees aware of this potentially systematic gender bias could help curtail this issue.
Source: Phys.org
I’ve been very much looking forward to reading Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield, so I was delighted to discover today that, despite having a release date of 9th July, I could already download the ePUB!
Adam generously featured on an episode during the last season of our podcast, The Tao of WAO and was generous with his time. Go and listen to that to discover what the book’s original title was, and also pre-order the book!
I have a particular suspicion of the kind of book that spends 10 chapters telling the reader the many problems that face the contemporary world, and then follows with a final chapter that offers something - socialism, say - as the simple solution to all our woes. I call this the ‘11 Chapter problem’, and warn every author to avoid this trap. It is often easy to diagnose the problem; it is far harder to think clearly about what we are meant to do about it. More often than not the reader is already well aware of the problems: the reason they pick up a book is to find solutions. And this is why I am so excited about Adam Greenfield’s Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire. Here is a book as a toolbox to build actual, hard-tacks answers to the crisis of the Long Emergency.
[…]
It starts as a building - a church, a library, a school gym - that is the Lifehouse. This is a place for everyone to go to in an emergency - a flood, fire, or hurricane. It will have a kitchen, beds, clothing storage. But it will also be its own power source - with generators or renewable energy from a wind turbine, or solar panels on the roof. It will also be able to produce its own food with vertical farming technology installed. It will be a tool library that allows for repair and restoration, even outside the emergency - with 3-D printing technology. It will also have a skills library so that the community knows who is a doctor, nurse, teacher or transport.
[…]
But sustaining that effort for the long term - the long emergency itself - is hard. Often communities fail to plan far enough ahead. They split and betray each other. They face insurmountable opposition who wish to take away their autonomy. The Lifehouse is designed with this in mind too. It is not an afterthought, but a deeply considered means in which to think about the future.
Source: Verso Book Club: Lifehouse
Chart: Population projections from the U.N. (black) and Tom Murphy (blue)
When it’s put as starkly as this, it’s interesting to think about a post-peak human population as something that might happen within my lifetime. The article cited below was linked to from this one by Tom Murphy of UC San Diego, who created the chart I’ve used to accompany this post.
I’m no expert, but Murphy’s reasoning seems reasonable, and I’d assume that the existing right-wing ‘natalism’ is likely to go mainstream within this decade. Interesting times.
Governments worldwide are in a race to see which one can encourage the most women to have the most babies. Hungary is slashing income tax for women with four or more children. Russia is offering women with 10 or more children a “Mother-Heroine” award. Greece, Italy, and South Korea are bribing women with attractive baby bonuses. China has instituted a three-child policy. Iran has outlawed free contraceptives and vasectomies. Japan has joined forces with the fertility industry to infiltrate schools to promote early childbearing. A leading UK demographer has proposed taxing the childless. Religious myths are preventing African men from getting vasectomies. A eugenics-inspired Natal conference just took place in the U.S., a nation leading the way in taking away reproductive rights.
[…]
The alarmism surrounding declining fertility rates is unfounded; it is a positive trend that represents greater reproductive choice, and one that we should accelerate. A smaller human population will immensely facilitate other transformations we need: mitigating climate change, conserving and rewilding ecosystems, making agriculture sustainable, and making communities more resilient and able to integrate more climate and war refugees.
Source: CounterPunch
This paper, ‘Decentralized Social Networks and the Future of Free Speech Online’ explores the potential of decentralized social networks like Mastodon and BlueSky to enhance free speech by shifting control from central authorities to individual users. The author, Ted Huang, examines how decentralisation can promote the free speech values of knowledge, democracy, and autonomy, while also acknowledging the inherent challenges and trade-offs in practical implementation.
Huang highlights that decentralized networks face significant challenges in knowledge verification, effective moderation, and avoiding recentralisation. He notes that the ideal of decentralization often conflicts with practical needs, which necessitates some centralised mechanisms for such things as content moderation and cross-community communication. So, Huang argues, to truly empower users, we need inclusive design processes and ongoing policy discussions.
The decentralized social network has been widely viewed as a cure to its centralized counterpart, which is owned by corporate monopolies, funded by surveillance capitalism, and moderated according to rules made by the few (Gehl 2018, 2-3). The tremendous and unchecked power of those giant platforms was seen as a major threat to people’s rights and freedoms online. The newly emergent decentralized social networks, through infrastructural redesign, create a power-sharing scheme with the end users, so that it is the users themselves, rather than a corporate body, that determine how the communities shall be governed. Such an approach has been hailed as a promising way of curbing the monopolies and empowering the users. It was expected to bring more freedom of speech to individuals, and the vision it underscores – openness rather than walled-gardens, bottom-up rather than top-down – represents the future of the Internet (Ricknell 2020, 115).
[…]
The discussion of the decentralization project is trending, but it is too limited because there lacks systematic and critical review on the project’s normative implications. In particular, the current debate is mostly restricted to the technical circle, without sufficient input and participation from other fields such as policy, law and ethics. So far, researchers on the decentralized social networks mainly focus on their technical difficulties and features, rather than its social implications (Marx & Cheong 2023, 2). Lawmakers and regulators in the world have paid little attention yet to regulating this new technical paradigm (Friedl & Morgan 2024, 8). For decentralized networks to serve as the desirable future of online communications, we need to know why this is so and how it can be achieved. Will decentralized networks better facilitate the free speech online than the centralized platforms? How to design the new space to make it really fit with our value commitments? All the utopian and dystopian analyses of the decentralized future are only possibilities: what matters is the choices we make about how these technologies are designed and used (Cohnh & Mir 2022). Value commitments must be carefully examined and considered in the design process.
Source: arXiv
Image: Omar Flores
For the past few years, I’ve been on the list of ‘vulnerable’ people who get a free booster Covid vaccine due to my asthma. That’s no longer the case, but Covid is still around, and mutating.
This interview with someone who, admittedly, runs a Covid testing company, has made me think that perhaps I need to pay for a private vaccine because I really don’t want Long Covid. Even the venerable Venkatesh Rao has written about the cognitive impact that he suspects Covid has had on him.
Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office that pioneered the synthetic biology industry and the development of mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a COVID diagnostic testing company. He has stepped forward as a strong critic of government COVID management, accusing health agencies of inadequacy and even deception. Alvelda is pushing for accountability and immediate action to tackle Long COVID and fend off future pandemics with stronger public health strategies.
[…]
PA: There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period. Other data, like studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came to similar conclusions, reporting that traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high across the country in 2021. The TRIP report also looked at traffic fatalities on a national level and found that traffic fatalities increased by 19%.
[…]
Damage from COVID could be affecting people who are flying our planes, too. We’ve had pilots that had to quit because they couldn’t control the airplanes anymore. We know that medical events among U.S. military pilots were shown to have risen over 1,700% from 2019 to 2022, which the Pentagon attributes to the virus.
[…]
PA: What does this look like if we continue on the way we are doing right now? What is the worst-case scenario? Well, I think there are two important eventualities. So we’re what, four years in? Most people have had COVID three and a half times on average already. After another four years of the same pattern, if we don’t change course, most people in the U.S. will have some flavor of Long COVID of one sort or another.
Audrey Watters cites the work of Zoë Schlanger who asks what we mean by ‘intelligence’. This is important, of course, because we’re often prepending the word ‘artificial’ to it, meaning that we’re foregrounding something and backgrounding something else. It’s a zeugma.
Really, it’s intelligence I’ve been thinking about lately, as I’ve been reading Zoë Schlanger’s new book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.
[…]
What do we mean, Schlanger asks, by “intelligence”? What behaviors indicate that an organism, plant or otherwise, is “thinking”? How does one “think” without a nervous system, without a brain? Some of the reasons why we’ve answered these questions in such a way to deny plant intelligence can be traced, of course, to ancient Greece and to the Aristotelian insistence that thinking is the purview solely of Man. It’s a particular kind of thinking too that is privileged in this definition: rationality.
And it’s that form of “thinking,” of “intelligence” that is privileged in the discussions about artificial intelligence. It’s actually an inferior, or at least grossly limited version of intelligence, if it’s intelligence at all — the idea that entities, animal or machine, are programmed, coded. It’s so incredibly limiting.
Source: Second Breakfast
Image: Shane Rounce
Miles Astray is a photographer who recently won the People’s Vote and a Jury Award in the artificial intelligence category of 1839 Awards. The photo is of a flamingo whose head is apparently missing.
The twist: the photo is as real as the simple belly scratch the bird is busy with.
With AI-generated content remodelling the digital landscape rapidly while sparking an ever-fiercer debate about its implications for the future of content and the creators behind it – from creatives like artists, journalists, and graphic designers to employees in all sorts of industries – I entered this actual photo into the AI category of 1839 Awards to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and her human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits.
After seeing recent instances of AI-generated imagery outshining actual photos in competitions, it occurred to me that I could twist this story inside down and upside out the way only a human could and would, by submitting a real photo into an AI competition. My work F L A M I N G O N E was the perfect candidate because it’s a surreal and almost unimaginable shot, and yet completely natural. It is the first real photo to win an AI award.
Source: Miles Astray
Source: Fix The News
Credit: Natalie Renier/Woods Hole Oceanograpic Instition
As ever with Venkatesh Rao’s posts, there’s a lot going on with this one. Ostensibly, it’s about the third anniversary of the most recent iteration of his newsletter, but along the way he discusses the current state of the world. It’s a post worth reading for the latter reason, but I’m focused here on the role of writing and publishing online, which I do quite a lot.
Rao tries to fit his posts into one of five narrative scaffoldings which cover different time spans. Everything else falls by the wayside. I do the opposite: just publishing everything so I’ve got a URL for all of the thoughts, and I can weave it together on demand later. I think Cory Doctorow is a bit more like that, too (although more organised and a much better writer than me!)
As a writer, you cannot both react to the world and participate in writing it into existence — the bit role in “inventing the future” writers get to play — at the same time. My own approach to resolving this tension has been to use narratives at multiple time scales as scaffolding for sense-making. Events that conform (but not necessarily confirm) to one or more of my narratives leave me with room to develop my ab initio creative projects. Events that either do not conform to my narratives or simply fall outside of them entirely tend to derail or drain my creative momentum. It is the writer’s equivalent of what in computer architecture is called speculative execution. If you’re right enough, often enough, as a writer, you can have your cake and eat it too — react to the world, and say what you want to say at the same time.
[…]
Writing seemed like a more culturally significant, personally satisfying, aesthetically appropriate, and existentially penetrating thing to be doing in 2014 than it does now in 2024. I think we live in times when writing has less of a role to play in inventing the future, for a variety of reasons. You have to work harder at it, for less reward, in a smaller role. Fortunately for my sanity, writing is not the only thing I do with my life.
[…]
Maybe we’re just at the end of a long arc of 25 years or so, when writing online was exceptionally culturally significant and happened to line up with my most productive writing years, and the other shoe has dropped on the story of “blogging.”
Source: Ribbonfarm Studio
I spend a lot of time online, but do I ‘hang out’ there? I certainly hang out with people playing video games, but that’s online rather than on the internet. Drew Austin argues that because of the amount of money and algorithms on the internet, it’s impossible to hang out there.
I’m not sure. It depends on your definition of ‘hanging out’ and it also depends whether you’re just focusing on mainstream services, or whether you’re including the Fediverse and niche things such as School of the Possible. The latter, held every Friday by Dave Grey, absolutely is ‘hanging out’, but whether Zoom calls with breakout rooms count as the internet depends on semantics, I guess.
Is “hanging out” on the internet truly possible? I will argue: no it’s not. We’re bombarded with constant thinkpieces about various social crises—young people are sad and lonely; culture is empty or flat or simply too fragmented to incubate any shared meaning; algorithms determine too much of what we see. Some of these essays even note our failure to hang out. The internet is almost always an implicit or explicit villain in such writing but it’s increasingly tedious to keep blaming it for our cultural woes.
Perhaps we could frame the problem differently: The internet doesn’t have to demand our presence the way it currently does. It shouldn’t be something we have to look at all time. If it wasn’t, maybe we’d finally be free to hang out.
[…]
How many hours have been stolen from us? With TV, we at least understood ourselves to be passive observers of the screen, but the interactive nature of the internet fostered the illusion that message boards, Discord servers, and Twitter feeds are digital “places” where we can in fact hang out. If nothing else, this is a trick that gets us to stick around longer. A better analogy for online interaction, however, is sitting down to write a letter to a friend—something no one ever mistook for face-to-face interaction—with the letters going back and forth so rapidly that they start to resemble a real-time conversation, like a pixelated image. Despite all the spatial metaphors in which its interfaces have been dressed up, the internet is not a place.
Source: Kneeling Bus
Image: Wesley Tingey
First things first, the George Orwell quotation below is spurious, as the author of this article, David Cain, points out at the end of it. The point is that, it sounds plausible, so we take it on trust. It confirms our worldview.
We live in a web of belief, as W.V. Quine put it, meaning that we easily accept things that confirm our core beliefs. And then, with beliefs that are more peripheral, we pick them up and put them down at no great cost. Finding out that the capital of Burkina Faso is Ouagadougou and not Bobo-Dioulasso makes no practical difference to my life. It would make a huge difference to the residents of either city, however.
I don’t like misinformation, and I think we’re in quite a dangerous time in terms of how it might affect democratic elections. However, it has always been so. Gossip, rumour, and straight up lies have swayed human history. The thing is that, just as we are able to refute poor journalism and false statements on social networks about issues we know a lot about, so we need to be a bit skeptical about things outside of our immediate knowledge.
After all, as Cain quotes Michael Crichton as saying, there are plenty of ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories out there, getting causality exactly backwards — intentionally or otherwise.
Consider the possibility that most of the information being passed around, on whatever topic, is bad information, even where there’s no intentional deception. As George Orwell said, “The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.”
Technology may have made this state of affairs inevitable. Today, the vast majority of person’s worldview is assembled from second-hand sources, not from their own experience. Second-hand knowledge, from “reliable” sources or not, usually functions as hearsay – if it seems true, it is immediately incorporated into one’s worldview, usually without any attempt to substantiate it. Most of what you “know” is just something you heard somewhere.
[…]
It makes perfect sense, if you think about it, that reporting is so reliably unreliable. Why do we expect reporters to learn about a suddenly newsworthy situation, gather information about it under deadline, then confidently explain the subject to the rest of the nation after having known about it for all of a week? People form their entire worldviews out of this stuff.
[…]
People do know things though. We have airplanes and phones and spaceships. Clearly somebody knows something. Human beings can be reliable sources of knowledge, but only about small slivers of the whole of what’s going on. They know things because they deal with their sliver every day, and they’re personally invested in how well they know their sliver, which gives them constant feedback on the quality of their beliefs.
Source: Raptitude
This long article in The New Yorker is based around the author wondering whether the fun he’s had playing with his four year-old will be remembered by his son when he grows up.
Wondering whether you are the same person at the start and end of your life was a central theme of a ‘Mind, Brain, and Personal Identity’ course I did as part of my Philosophy degree around 22 years ago. I still think about it. On the one hand is the Ship of Theseus argument, where you can one-by-one replace all of the planks of a ship, but it’s still the same ship. If you believe it’s the same ship, and believe that you’re the same person as when you were younger, then the author of this article would call you a ‘Continuer’.
On the other hand, if you think that there are important differences between the person you are now and when you were younger. If, for example, the general can’t remember ‘going over the top’ as a young man, despite still having the medal to prove it, is he the same person? If you don’t think so, then perhaps you are a ‘Divider’.
I don’t consider it so clean cut. We tell stories about ourselves and others, and these shape how we think. For example, going to therapy five years ago helped me ‘remove the mask’ and reconsider who I am. That involved reframing some of the experiences in my life and realising that I am this kind of person rather than that kind of person.
It’s absolutely fine to have seasons in your life. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s some ancient wisdom to that effect?
Are we the same people at four that we will be at twenty-four, forty-four, or seventy-four? Or will we change substantially through time? Is the fix already in, or will our stories have surprising twists and turns? Some people feel that they’ve altered profoundly through the years, and to them the past seems like a foreign country, characterized by peculiar customs, values, and tastes. (Those boyfriends! That music! Those outfits!) But others have a strong sense of connection with their younger selves, and for them the past remains a home. My mother-in-law, who lives not far from her parents’ house in the same town where she grew up, insists that she is the same as she’s always been, and recalls with fresh indignation her sixth birthday, when she was promised a pony but didn’t get one. Her brother holds the opposite view: he looks back on several distinct epochs in his life, each with its own set of attitudes, circumstances, and friends. “I’ve walked through many doorways,” he’s told me. I feel this way, too, although most people who know me well say that I’ve been the same person forever.
[…]
The philosopher Galen Strawson believes that some people are simply more “episodic” than others; they’re fine living day to day, without regard to the broader plot arc. “I’m somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum,” Strawson writes in an essay called “The Sense of the Self.” “I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and little interest in my own past.”
[…]
John Stuart Mill once wrote that a young person is like “a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” The image suggests a generalized spreading out and reaching up, which is bound to be affected by soil and climate, and might be aided by a little judicious pruning here and there.
Source: The New Yorker
Can’t access it? Try Pocket or Archive Buttons
Source: 2024 Drone Photo Awards Nominees
It’s announcement time at Apple’s WWDC. And apart from trying to rebrand AI as “Apple Intelligence” I haven’t seen many people get very excited about it. MKBHD has an overview if you want to get into the details. I just use macOS without iCloud because everything works and my Mac Studio is super-fast.
Ryan Broderick has a word for Apple fanboys, who seem to think that everything they touch is gold. Seems like their Vision Pro hasn’t brought VR mainstream, and after the more innovative Steve Jobs era, it seems like they’re more happy to be a luxury brand that plays it relatively safe.
If you press Apple fanboys about their weird revisionist history, they usually pivot to the argument that while iOS’s marketshare has essentially remained flat for a decade, their competitors copy what they do and that trickles down into popular culture from there. Which I’m not even sure is true either. Android had mobile payments three years before Apple, had a smartwatch a year before, a smart speaker a year before, and launched a tablet around the same time as the iPad. We could go on and on here.
And, I should say, I don’t actually think Apple sees themselves as the great innovator their Gen X blogger diehards do. In the 2010s, they shifted comfortably from a visionary tastemaker, at least aesthetically, into something closer to an airport lounge or a country club for consumer technology. They’ll eventually have a version of the new thing you’ve heard about, once they can rebrand it as something uniquely theirs. It’s not VR, it’s “spatial computing,” it’s not AI, it’s “Apple Intelligence”. But they’re not going to shake the boat. They make efficiently-bundled software that’s easy to use (excluding iPadOS) and works well across their nice-looking and easy-to-use devices (excluding the iPad). Which is why Apple Intelligence is not going to be the revolution the AI industry has been hoping for. The same way the Vision Pro wasn’t. The iPhone effect, if it was ever real in the first place, is certainly not real now.
Source: Garbage Day
I could listen to Dan Carlin read the phone book all day, so to read the announcement that his latest multi-part (and multi-hour!) series for the Hardcore History podcast has started is great news!
So, after almost two decades of teasing it, we finally begin the Alexander the Great saga.
I have no idea how many parts it will turn out to be, but we are calling the series “Mania for Subjugation” and you can get the first installment HERE. (of course you can also auto-download it through your regular podcast app).
[…]
And what a story it is! My go-to example in any discussion about how truth is better than fiction. It is such a good tale and so mind blowing that more than 2,300 years after it happened our 21st century people still eagerly consume books, movies, television shows and podcasts about it. Alexander is one of the great apex predators of history, and he has become a metaphor for all sorts of Aesop fables-like morals-to-the-story about how power can corrupt and how too much ambition can be a poison.
Source: Look Behind You!
Ryan Broderick with a reality check about OpenAI and GenAI in general:
I think this [Effective Altruists vs effective accelerationists debate] is all very silly. I also think this the logical conclusion of rich, isolated computer programmers having ketamine orgies with each other. But it does, unfortunately, underpin every debate you’re probably seeing about the future of AI. Silicon Valley’s elite believe in these ideas so devoutly that Google is comfortable sacrificing its own business in pursuit of them. Even though EA and e/acc are effectively just competing cargo cults for a fancy autocorrect. Though, they also help alleviate some of the intense pressure huge tech companies are under to stay afloat in the AI arms race. Here’s how it works.
[…]
Analysts told The Information last year that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is possibly costing the company up to $700,000 a day to operate. Sure, Microsoft invested $13 billion in the company and, as of February, OpenAI was reportedly projecting $2 billion in revenue, but it’s not just about maintaining what you’ve built. The weird nerds I mentioned above have all decided that the finish line here is “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, a sentient AI model. Which is actually very funny because now every major tech company has to burn all of their money — and their reputations — indefinitely, as they compete to build something that is, in my opinion, likely impossible (don’t @ me). This has largely manifested as a monthly drum beat of new AI products no one wants rolling out with increased desperation. But you know what’s cheaper than churning out new models? “Scaring” investors.
[…]
This is why OpenAI lets CEO Sam Altman walk out on stages every few weeks and tell everyone that its product will soon destroy the economy forever. Because every manager and executive in America hears that and thinks, “well, everyone will lose their jobs but me,” and continues paying for their ChatGPT subscription. As my friend Katie Notopoulos wrote in Business Insider last week, it’s likely this is the majority of what Altman’s role is at OpenAI. Doomer in chief.
[…]
I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep repeating it until the god computer sends me to cyber hell: The “two” “sides” of the AI “debate“ are not real. They both result in the same outcome — an entire world run by automations owned by the ultra-wealthy. Which is why the most important question right now is not, “how safe is this AI model?” It’s, “do we need even need it?”
Source: Garbage Day
Image: Google DeepMind
I posted on social media recently that I want more verbs and fewer nouns in my life. This article, via Dense Discovery backs this sentiment up, with reference to the author of Braiding Sweetgrass' indigenous heritage.
Grammar, especially our use of pronouns, is the way we chart relationships in language and, as it happens, how we relate to each other and to the natural world.
[…]
[…]
We have a special grammar for personhood. We would never say of our late neighbor, “It is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.” Such language would be deeply disrespectful and would rob him of his humanity. We use instead a special grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of he or she, a grammar of personhood for both living and dead Homo sapiens. Yet we say of the oriole warbling comfort to mourners from the treetops or the oak tree herself beneath whom we stand, “It lives in Oakwood Cemetery.” In the English language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are lumped with the nonliving “its.”
There are words for states of being that have no equivalent in English. The language that my grandfather was forbidden to speak is composed primarily of verbs, ways to describe the vital beingness of the world. Both nouns and verbs come in two forms, the animate and the inanimate. You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is merely an object.
[…]
Linguistic imperialism has always been a tool of colonization, meant to obliterate history and the visibility of the people who were displaced along with their languages… Because we speak and live with this language every day, our minds have also been colonized by this notion that the nonhuman living world and the world of inanimate objects have equal status. Bulldozers, buttons, berries, and butterflies are all referred to as it, as things, whether they are inanimate industrial products or living beings.
Source: Orion Magazine
If you haven’t come across the The New Design Congress before, I highly suggest reading their essays and research notes, and subscribing to their newsletter. The following is an excerpt from their most recent issue:
It is not only a gluttony for energy that animates Big and Small Tech, but also social legitimacy. Here, oblivion doesn’t just mean eradication: it is erasure. This manifests in the social burden of the so-called ‘unintended consequences’ of technology. There is much concern to hold regarding the deployment of digitised forms of identification, including so-called decentralised and self-sovereign ones. Feasible only at immense scale, their proposed reliance on power-hungry blockchains so susceptible to scams, frauds and wastefulness is but one issue. Digital identities sketch schizophrenic futures made of radical self-custody combined with naive market-based ecosystems of private identity managers. This assetisation is backed by a trust mechanism bound to become the mother of all social engineering attack vector, relying as it does on idealist claims of identity. If trustworthiness within a digital identity system can be defined as that which is necessary to permit access, it can also be defined as that which necessarily breaks security policies. In the US and UK, voter ID is already an efficient weapon for reactionary power structures to fight off democratic participation, particularly of minorities. No actors in the field has seriously reckoned with such socio-technical weaponisation of their tech stack.
As we etched in the previous Cable, another world is possible. One where new modes of self- and interpersonal recognition are developed from a posture of conciliation, rather than a fragile and vampiric extraction of socially-shared goods. The challenge now is sifting through the gold rush, to find systems that are capable of fulfilling this promise.
Source: CABLE 2024/03-05
I wouldn’t usually link to UnHerd, but the figure quoted here is taken from a tweet by Rory Stewart, who I do trust. I’m hugely concerned about creeping authoritarianism, and so why I’m dead against the Tories, I can’t see how an even further-right party in the guise of Reform UK is something to be celebrated.
While I get the desire to have someone to sort things out, the way we do so is together using systems. Not by electing a tough-talking figurehead who dispenses with elections.
It is no wonder that, after a generation of Conservative Party rule, 46% of British adults now support “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliamentary elections”, a figure which rises to 65% of those aged 18-35. By Gove’s definition, the majority of the electorate will soon be composed of extremists: this widening gulf between the governing and the governed is not a recipe for political stability.
Source: UnHerd
Image: Cold War Steve
TIME has a list of the ‘best podcasts of 2024 so far’. 99% Invisible is great, but my favourite podcasts are nowhere to be seen on here, not to mention my own with Laura, The Tao of WAO! I love podcasts, and listen to them while running, in the gym, washing dishes, in the car, mowing the lawn… wherever,
You can download an OPML file (?) of all of the shows I subscribe via my Open Source app of choice, AntennaPod. My favourites at the moment though, in alphabetical order, are:
It’s getting increasingly difficult to discover new treasures in the cacophonous world of podcasting. There are a lot of shows—many of them not good. It seems every week a new celebrity announces a podcast in which they ask other celebrities out-of-touch questions or revisit their own network sitcom heyday. And studios continue to scrounge for the most morally dubious true-crime topics they can find.
Source: TIME
Image: C D-X
I agree with this so much. I’ve had jobs where I’ve been entitled to private health insurance, which I’ve turned down because I want to have a stake in the success and continued existence of the National Health Service. I’d love a world where I don’t have to have a car because public transport is ubiquitous. I would never send my kids to private school, and am delighted that Labour have announced that, if they get into power, they’ll raise money for public schools from taxing private schools like the businesses they are.
One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it. If, for example, you outlawed private schools, the public schools would get better. They would get better not because every child deserves to have a quality education, but rather because it would be the only for rich and powerful people to ensure that their children were going to good schools. The theory of “a rising tide lifts all boats” does not work when you allow the people with the most influence to buy their way out of the water. It would be nice if we fixed broken systems simply because they are broken. In practice, governments are generally happy to ignore broken things if they do not affect people with enough power to make the government listen. So the more people that we push into public systems, the better.
Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.
Source: How Things Work
Image: Daniel Sinoca
Audrey Watters links to this post by Rob Horning which talks about sports, social media, AI, and Guy Debord. So pretty much catnip for me.
I’m just going to share the part about TikTok and Debord’s ‘spectacle’. It’s worth reading the rest of it for how Horning then goes on to apply this to LLMs such as GPT-4o and the semblance of doing rather than simply watching and consuming.
The way TikTok conflates experience with voyeurism makes it a somewhat clear demonstration of Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle.” Debord argues that under the conditions of late 20th century capitalism — conditions of media centricity and monopoly that have only intensified into our century — spectacle and lived experience are in a complex dialectic that sustains a generalized alienation and a universal reification. “It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see, commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.” Debord concludes that individuals are “condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality” and are driven to “resorting to magical devices” to “entertain the illusion” of “reacting to this fate.” TikTok could be considered as one of those magical devices (along with the phone in its entirety) that manages that dialectic. Under the guise of “entertainment,” passivity reappears to the entertained individual as a kind of perfected agency; alienation is redeemed as the requisite precursor to consumer delectation.
The way TikTok conflates experience with voyeurism makes it a somewhat clear demonstration of Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle.” Debord argues that under the conditions of late 20th century capitalism — conditions of media centricity and monopoly that have only intensified into our century — spectacle and lived experience are in a complex dialectic that sustains a generalized alienation and a universal reification. “It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see, commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.” Debord concludes that individuals are “condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality” and are driven to “resorting to magical devices” to “entertain the illusion” of “reacting to this fate.” TikTok could be considered as one of those magical devices (along with the phone in its entirety) that manages that dialectic. Under the guise of “entertainment,” passivity reappears to the entertained individual as a kind of perfected agency; alienation is redeemed as the requisite precursor to consumer delectation.
“The spectacle is essentially tautological,” Debord writes, “for the simple reason that its means and ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory.”
Source: Internal exile
We were using the CC0-licensed Humaaans for some work this week when the client decided they didn’t particularly like them. When searching for alternatives, I stumbled across Absurd Designs which doesn’t work any better, but which I’ve used for a couple of posts on my personal blog.
What about absurd illustrations for your projects? Take every user on an individual journey through their own imagination.
Source: Absurd Designs
Dan Sutch, who I’ve known at this point in various roles for around 17 years, introduces the ‘AI Egg’ to make sense different perspectives / discussion contexts, for Generative AI.
I think it bears more than a passing resemblance to the SAMR model, which focuses on educational technology transformation. I talked about that last year in relation to AI. What can I say, it’s a curse being ahead of the curve.
We’ve held thousands of conversations with charities, trusts and foundations, digital agencies and community groups discussing the opportunities and challenges of Generative AI (GenAI). One thing we’ve learnt is that the scale and speed of the changes means there are thousands more conversations to have (and much more action too). The reason is that there are many discussions, debates (and again, action!) to be had at multiple levels, because of the scale of the implications of GenAI.
Source: CAST Writers
I only found out about this online event featuring Gerald Midgley shortly before it occurred. I couldn’t make it, but I’m glad there’s a recording so that I can watch it at some point as part of my learning around systems thinking.
In this post, Andrew Curry, whose newsletter is well worth subscribing to, summarises the main points that Midgley made on his blog.
I’m a member of the Agri-Foods for Net Zero network, and it runs a good series of knowledge sharing events. (I’ve written about AFNZ here before). Last month it invited one of Britain’s leading systems academics, Gerald Midgley, to do an introductory talk on using systems thinking to explore complex problems.
[…] The questions he addressed were:
What are highly complex problems?
What is systems thinking?
Different systems approaches for different purposes
Source: The Next Wave
I haven’t spent enough time alone recently. I need to get back out into the mountains with my tent.
Neuroscientists have discovered that, regardless of your clinical label, those of us who prefer solitude have something in common. We tend to have low levels of oxytocin in our brains, and higher levels of vasopressin. That’s the recipe for introverts and recluses, even hermits. Michael Finkel talks about this brain profile in his book The Stranger in The Woods, about a hermit named Christopher Knight. He lived in the backwoods of Maine for nearly three decades, living off goods pillaged from cabins and vacation homes. He terrified residents, but nobody could ever find him.
When police finally found Knight, they were shocked. The guy was in nearly perfect mental and physical health. Locals didn’t believe his story. They expected the Unabomber. Instead, Knight turned out to be a pleasant guy who loved reading. He was easy to get along with. He had no grudge against society. Therapists got exhausted trying to diagnose him and gave up. “I diagnose him as a hermit,” they said.
[…]
Society doesn’t leave hermits alone. They’re doing everything they can to force social interaction on everyone. They insist it’s good for you, ignoring the evidence that solitude can benefit people, lowering their blood pressure and even encouraging brain cell growth. It just so happens that social activity drives this twisted economy.
It makes sense why you want to be alone.
Source: OK Doomer
Albert Wenger, the only Venture Capitalist I pay any attention to, writes on his blog that… he misses writing on his blog. He talks about a couple of reasons for this, the first of which is the usual excuse of “being too busy”.
It’s the second reason that interests me, though, especially as I feel the same futility:
[T]he world is continuing to descend back into tribalism. And it has been exhausting trying to maintain a high rung approach to topics amid an onslaught of low rung bullshit. Whether it is Israel-Gaza, the Climate Crisis or Artificial Intelligence, the online dialog is dominated by the loudest voices. Words have been rendered devoid of meaning and reduced to pledges of allegiance to a tribe. I start reading what people are saying and often wind up feeling isolated and exhausted. I don’t belong to any of the tribes nor would I want to. But the effort required to maintain internally consistent and intellectually honest positions in such an environment is daunting. And it often seems futile.
Source: Continuations
Image: Timon Studler
This article focuses on research that reveals people who do ‘boundary work’ within organisations, that is to say, individuals who span different silos, are more likely to suffer burnout and exhibit negative social behaviours.
The researchers used “field data, surveys, and experiments involving more than 2,000 working adults across two countries” and found that there are three ways that organisations can reap the benefits of this boundary work while mitigating the downsides:
While past research has documented many benefits of boundary-spanning, we suspected that individuals collaborating across silos may be faced with higher levels of cognitive and emotional demands, which could lead to higher levels of burnout. We also wanted to understand if the exhaustion and burnout they faced may lead to abusive behavior toward others.
[…]
Cross-silo collaboration is a double-edged sword in the modern workplace. While it undeniably serves as a catalyst for expedited coordination and innovation, it can adversely affect the well-being of those who engage in it. The good news is that organizations can adopt a multifaceted approach to support their boundary-spanning employees.
Source: Harvard Business Review
I came across this post yesterday in which I was interested primarily for the graphic. The author didn’t specifically acknowledge the source, but I found Joseph Voros' blog in which he explains how he came up with what he calls The Futures Cone:
The above descriptions are best considered not as rigidly-separate categories, but rather as nested sets or nested classes of futures, with the progression down through the list moving from the broadest towards more narrow classes, ultimately to a class of one — the ‘projected’. Thus, every future is a potential future, including those we cannot even imagine — these latter are outside the cone, in the ‘dark’ area, as it were. The cone metaphor can be likened to a spotlight or car headlight: bright in the centre and diffusing to darkness at the edge — a nice visual metaphor of the extent of our futures ‘vision’, so to speak. There is a key lesson to the listener when using this metaphor—just because we cannot imagine a future does not mean it cannot happen…
Source: The Voroscope
This article by Laura Killingbeck is definitely worth reading in its entirety. Not only is it extremely well-written, it gives a real-world example to a hypothetical internet discussion. Killingbeck is a long-term ‘bikepacker’ and therefore the “man or bear” question is one she grapples with on a regular basis.
The central reason why fewer women travel alone is our fear of male violence and sexual assault. Actually, the most common question I get about my travels is some version of, “Aren’t you afraid to bike/hike/travel alone as a woman?” By naming my gender, the implication is clear. What people really mean is, “Aren’t you afraid of men?”
This leads us straight back to the original conversation about “Man or Bear,” which has nothing to do with bears. (Sorry, bears!) “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” is just another way of asking, “Are you afraid of men?” It’s the same question I’ve been fielding for the entirety of my life as a solo female traveler. It’s the same question that hovers over women all the time as we move through the world.
And it’s a question that’s always been difficult for me to answer. I’m not afraid of all men. But I am afraid of some men. The real problem is the gray area in between and what it takes to manage the murkiness of that unknown.
Source: Bikepacking
Imagine how absolutely terrified of competition Google must be to be to put the output from the current crop of LLMs front-and-centre in their search engine, which dominates the market.
This post collates some of the examples of the ‘hallucinations’ that have been produced. Thankfully, AFAIK it’s only available in North America at the moment. It’s all fun and games, I guess, until someone seeking medical advice dies.
Also, this is how misinformation is likely to even worse - not necessarily by people being fed conspiracy theories through social media, but by being encouraged to use an LLM-powered search engine trained on them.
Google tested out AI overviews for months before releasing them nationwide last week, but clearly, that wasn’t enough time. The AI is hallucinating answers to several user queries, creating a less-than-trustworthy experience across Google’s flagship product. In the last week, Gizmodo received AI overviews from Google that reference glue-topped pizza and suggest Barack Obama was Muslim.
The hallucinations are concerning, but not entirely surprising. Like we’ve seen before with AI chatbots, this technology seems to confuse satire with journalism – several of the incorrect AI overviews we found seem to reference The Onion. The problem is that this AI offers an authoritative answer to millions of people who turn to Google Search daily to just look something up. Now, at least some of these people will be presented with hallucinated answers.
Source: Gizmodo
This looks promising! As with everything like this, though, the more data we capture about the body, the more we need robust privacy legislation and security protocols.
Also, I’m pretty sure this could be printed as a form of tattoo on the surface of the human skin, so it could be art as well as science.
Researchers have developed a method to make adaptive and eco-friendly sensors that can be directly and imperceptibly printed onto a wide range of biological surfaces, whether that’s a finger or a flower petal.
The method, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, takes its inspiration from spider silk, which can conform and stick to a range of surfaces. These ‘spider silks’ also incorporate bioelectronics, so that different sensing capabilities can be added to the ‘web’.
The fibres, at least 50 times smaller than a human hair, are so lightweight that the researchers printed them directly onto the fluffy seedhead of a dandelion without collapsing its structure. When printed on human skin, the fibre sensors conform to the skin and expose the sweat pores, so the wearer doesn’t detect their presence. Tests of the fibres printed onto a human finger suggest they could be used as continuous health monitors.
[…]
The researchers say their devices could be used in applications from health monitoring and virtual reality, to precision agriculture and environmental monitoring. In future, other functional materials could be incorporated into this fibre printing method, to build integrated fibre sensors for augmenting the living systems with display, computation, and energy conversion functions.
One of the many things that I’ve learned from Laura is that people need things to do with their hands. That’s true with virtual workshops where emails are only a click away, but it’s also true in-person as well.
This post talks about this as an ‘ancient need’ which might explain stone knapping. The author, Matt Webb, suggests that we could lift this ‘evolutionary burden’ somewhat by, instead of teaching kids to better tolerate boredom, teach them a skill which involves using their hands. It’s not a bad idea, you know. I was giving kids blu-tack to fiddle with 15 years ago when I was a teacher, and not just the neurodivergent ones!
If I were to try something revolutionary, I mean truly revolutionary on a generational scale, here’s what it would be:
I would sneak a new fiddle urge fulfiller into the national school curriculum.
I wouldn’t plan on teaching kids how to tolerate boredom as they get older, or how to be more comfortable than previous generations inside their own heads. Those are unstable solutions.
I mean instead I would work to come up with something in the family of pen flipping or polyrhythm finger tapping or rolling a coin over the knuckles. Or I’d invent secular rosary beads or make child-safe whittling knives.
Something like that. Self-contained, not networked. Automatic, with room for skill, dextrous.
And I’d make sure this new skill was taught and drilled before these kids even have much conscious awareness, like right when they start pre-school, so it’s there for them throughout their lives.
Source: Matt Webb
Related: Museum of Stone Tools (which is where the image is from)
Although things are pretty quiet at the moment, I usually average around 20 hours of paid work per week. When I tell them, people seem surprised at this, but when you strip away the pointless meetings, bureaucracy, and frustration that can come with regular employment, it’s entirely possible to (in normal times) earn a decent salary working half the number of hours.
This article shares the case of Josh Epperson, who works 10-15 hours per week and earns ~$100k/year after starting what he calls ‘The Experiment’. On a side note, I’m also sharing the image that comes with the article to comment how lazy it is: who uses a briefcase in 2024? Also, as the article mentions explicitly, Epperson is spending the time he’s not working doing community stuff, not lazing on the beach.
For me, I spend a lot of time on the side of football pitches and basketball courts. I’m almost always around for my kids, because I work from home and try and get most of my work done while they’re at school. This, to my mind, is the way it should be. Apart from school, but that’s a whole other post…
Epperson began The Experiment by scaling back the obligations on his time and money. He resigned from his role on the board of a Black film festival. He moved out of his swanky apartment to a cheaper part of Richmond and traded in his Land Rover for a Honda CR-V. Despite these downgrades, his new path came with advantages. Epperson prepared his meals and ate more healthily. He spent unhurried afternoons with friends in the garden. And he got into regular meditation and exercise.
Epperson also saw how the added time benefited his professional life. He started working on projects for the Smithsonian and an urban-farming nonprofit called Happily Natural. With more space around his work, his work got better. “In the old industrial model of employment, the more hours you put in, the more products come out,” he explained. But if the product is an idea for a marketing campaign or a headline for a website, Epperson found that there wasn’t a positive correlation between how many hours he put in and the quality of the output. With more room to seek inspiration and develop his ideas, Epperson was doing more work that made him proud.
What impressed me most from my time with Epperson is that he doesn’t treat leisure only as grist for the mill. He doesn’t unplug so that he can be more productive when he sits back down at his computer. Nor does he, like so many of us, exist in a perpetual state of half-work, swiping down at dinner to see if any new emails have come in.
For Epperson, reducing his working hours gives him the space to invest in other facets of his life. He is involved in his community. He is a generous friend. He takes care of his body. Walking the streets of Richmond with Epperson is like walking next to the mayor—he seemed to know every shopkeeper and skateboarder we passed.
Source: The Atlantic
The Swiss national airline has now incorporated the shark skin onto all of its long-haul 777 aircraft, with the final example to adorn the technology receiving it at the start of May… Last year, the airline saved nearly 2,200 tonnes of kerosene despite its 777 fleet not being fully fitted at the time.
Rather than being completely smooth, shark skin is unique in its ability to minimize drag through specific grooves, which, in aviation terms, allows for a smoother and more efficient flight.
AeroSHARK replicates this hydrodynamic property on aircraft. It is a “special film” made up of “tiny 50-micrometre riblets that reduce aerodynamic drag during flight.”
Source: Simple Flying
These Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinbugh look pretty awesome. I don’t think Cornel West uses any slides, either, so perfect to rip to MP3 and listen to while I’m out for a run! Although I guess I’ll miss some of his very expressive gestures :)
Prof. Cornel West delivers the 2024 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled ‘A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’.
Source: Bella Caledonia
I’m reserving judgement on this initiative until I find out more, but it seems to be in the same ball park as work done as part of initiatives in the US and Europe. Hopefully, it’s a UK-focused way of getting badges more mainstream, although I’m always a little wary when I see the word ‘microcredential’ as it’s a very supply-side term.
The RSA and Ufi VocTech Trust are leading work in this area. I’m hopefully talking with Rosie Clayton soon, who’s part of the team.
Building a movement towards greater understanding, development, and adoption of digital badges by accrediting bodies, policymakers, and employers, including other micro-credentialling providers outside of our mutual networks
Exploring the quality and interoperability of digital badges used by key awarding and accrediting organisations Making the case for a lifelong digital record of learning using digital badges and micro-credentials
Examining the feasibility of applying QA frameworks to digital badges so that they could be used to reward flexible learning pathways (e.g. in line with the lifelong learning entitlement)
Source: Digital Badging Commission
I’ve been at the Thinking Digital conference this week, where local guy Paul McMurray who works for Accenture, was on stage telling us about a website called Donation Genie.
He discovered that food banks often have to stop creating food parcels for hungry families because they’re missing certain items, and so he responded to a company challenge, won, and has continued to develop his creation to integrate with various APIs to improve efficiency, and thus help more people.
Food banks and warm spaces can update their wishlists detailing what they need.
Donation Genie compiles that information, so you know exactly what your community needs right now.
With Donation Genie, you can target your donation to make the biggest impact in your area.
Source: Donation Genie
Of all of the things that have launched recently, a breath of fresh air has been 404 Media. This is another article from there, which challenges us to think about recent news from OpenAI ushering a future that is less like the film Her and more like Metropolis.
In 1957, German director Fritz Lang introduced the world to the first on-screen fembot with his adaptation of his wife Thea von Harbou’s frenetic urban dystopia novel Metropolis. The character of the Maschinenmensch, a robot woman created by a mad scientist to replicate his dead lover (a deepfake, basically) hypnotizes the effete bourgeois with a dance. The men pant and pull their hair and scream, “For her, all seven deadly sins!”
Before Metropolis, automatons were seen as entertaining, odd tinkerings of inventors and the wealthy. Their history goes back to ancient Greece, through the Middle Ages and into the 18th century. Until that point, machine-men and women were fairly evenly represented (plus a lot of little robot animals). But in the 19th century, with the arrival of the industrial revolution, something changed. People became afraid of the progress happening around them, and feared mass unemployment thanks to these new factories and machines that separated workers from the products of their own labor.
That’s when depictions of the android as female started to take over. When machines started to be seen as a threat to male control, something to be feared and never to be fully understood, they were imagined as seductive pariahs, the original black box. The Maschinenmensch is burned at the stake.
“Fictional and factual fembots each reflect the same regressive male fantasies: sexual outlets and the promise of emotional validation and companionship,” researchers Kate Devlin and Olivia Belton wrote in their 2020 paper. “Underpinning this are masculine anxieties regarding powerful women, as well as the fear of technology exceeding our capacities and escaping our control.” Everyone is fixated on the flirtatious female voice because deep down, under the jokes about e-girls being “so over” and AI girlfriends as responsible for declining birth rates, people are actually, seriously afraid.
Source: 404 Media
Kate Raworth, who came up with the idea of Doughnut Economics, writes in The Guardian about how we need to move beyond the idea of endless growth. This goes beyond alternatives to GDP such as the Human Development Index (HDI) to take into account of environmental factors.
Instead of pursuing endless growth, it is time to pursue wellbeing for all people as part of a thriving world, with policymaking that is designed in the service of this goal. This results in a very different conception of progress: in the place of endless growth we seek a dynamic balance, one that aims to meet the essential needs of every person while protecting the life-supporting systems of our planetary home. And since we are the inheritors of economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, a critical challenge in high-income countries is to create economies that enable us to thrive, whether or not they grow.
[…]
When we turn away from growth as the goal, we can focus directly on asking what it would take to deliver social and ecological wellbeing, through an economy that is regenerative and distributive by design. There are many possibilities – such as driving a low-carbon, zero-waste industrial transformation, with a green jobs guarantee, alongside free public transport, personal carbon allowances, and progressive wealth taxes. Policies like these were, only a decade ago, considered too radical to be realistic. Today they look nothing less than essential.
Source: The Guardian
The older I get, the more different kinds of workouts (or drills) I need to do to keep supple and fit. This ‘James Bond’ workout could be useful, although I’m pretty sure the suit, fun, and martini are optional…
From the James Bond novels, we know that 007 liked to do all sorts of physical activities that could count as exercise: boxing, judo, swimming, and skiing. He was also a golfer, so he got some activity in that way.
[…]
In [From Russia With Love] (one of the 5 best books in the Bond canon), Fleming describes a short calisthenics routine that his secret agent does that’s capped off with a “James Bond shower.”
Source: The Art of Manliness
When you’re a freelancer, consultant, or part of an organisation that relies on contracts or funding from third parties, you get used to financial peaks and troughs. This year, so far, though has been flat. Worryingly flat. I’ve never seen so many Open To Work badges on LinkedIn. I’ve even put up the bat signal.
In this post, Rachel Coldicutt shares some worrying news about organisations in the UK’s social sector — including her own. I don’t know what’s going on, to be honest. Putting on my tinfoil hat would suggest various conspiracy theories, whereas donning my systems thinking hat would suggest a confluence of factors including Brexit, pre-election concerns, experimentation with AI, etc.
Anyway, if you need some help at the intersection of learning, technology, and community, I’m here to help! My organisation, WAO has worked with organisations such as Greenpeace, MIT, and Sport England. We’ve got lots of openly-licensed resources which we can use for consulting or workshops, and we’ve also got experience in running impactful programmes. Let’s have a chat.
“It’s a very British mentality at times of: everything’s bad, don’t expect better for yourself, just get on with your life until you’re dead.”
Another “British mentality” is that most people don’t like to talk about money. Not having it is seen as a failure, asking for it is unimaginably crass. You’re just, somehow, supposed to have it.
[…]
This year should be one of pump priming and relationship building, a time of new beginnings and opportunities. The changes many of us want to see certainly won’t happen quickly, but if we don’t collectively make an effort to share ideas, tell stories, show what’s possible - well, they won’t happen at all. This is a good time to get ready, to rebuild networks and ideas, to make things happen and create the conditions needed for change.
It’s hard to imagine a better future and build alternatives when you’re worrying about the bills.
[…]
From conversations I’m having, it feels like we’ve collectively reached a pretty urgent financial impasse and if we don’t break it, many more organisations will find they have to close this year.
[…]
Usually, organisations like mine - who take on a mix of projects from the small (£15-30k) to the medium (£50-85k) to the large (£150k+) – would get a little financial bump in March and April. We’re just small enough to benefit from the flurry of year-end underspends, and big enough to take part in the proposals and procurement rounds that usually begin with the new financial year. By the end of April, any short- and medium-term gaps in the pipeline have usually been filled.
That hasn’t happened this year. And it’s not just us, everyone I speak with is experiencing the same thing.
Source: Just Enough Internet
Some of these are perhaps a bit too literal for their own good, but this list of Chinese proverbs includes some I hadn’t seen/heard before. But then, I guess, lots of things are dubbed ‘Chinese proverbs’ that are of unknown provenance.
Here’s three of my favourites that I hadn’t come across before:
If you fall down by yourself, get up by yourself.
Every drama requires a fool.
Smart people also do stupid things.
Source: Futility Closet
Image: Henry & Co.
It’s looking like we might get another chance to see the aurora borealis tonight after the spectacular display in most places, including near us.
I thought this xkcd chart was funny/interesting given how underwhelmed I’ve been going to see things like the meridian line in Greenwich, London.
Source: xkcd
If there are people falling in love with chatbots powered by generative AI, you can bet there are people creating chatbots of deceased loved ones. I can understand the temptation, but I can’t see it being a particularly healthy one. And as this article points out, the vectors for disintformation and manipulation is immense.
Known as “deadbots” or “griefbots,” these AI clones are trained on data about the deceased. They then provide simulated interactions with virtual recreations of the departed.
This “postmortem presence” can social and psychological harm, according to researchers from Cambridge University.
Their new study highlights several risks. One involves the use of deadbots for advertising. By mimicking lost loved ones, deadbots could manipulate their vulnerable survivors into buying products.
Another concern addresses therapeutic applications. The researchers fear that these will create an “overwhelming emotional weight.” This could intensify the grieving process into endless virtual interactions.
Source: The Next Web
John Willshire, with whom I had an interesting chat this week, asked a question of Mike Monteiro. I confess not to follow the latter’s work, but liked his thoughtful and considered answer to John’s question: Which internet do you wish we’d ended up with instead of the one we got?
This is the most pertinent part of it, as far as I’m concerned:
Ultimately, I think we got the internet that reflects who we are.
We got an internet where a select few people have a lot of control because they have money. We got an internet where loud angry racists demand a lot of attention because they believe they deserve that attention. But we also got an internet where kids manage to connect with one another. We got an internet where trans kids can get make-up tutorials. We got an internet where the horrors of a genocide can be exposed, as much as the powers-that-be try to stifle that from happening. We got an internet where Kendrick can go ham. We got an internet that reflects both the horror and the beauty of who we are as human beings.
We got the internet that reflects who we are.
Do I want a better internet? Sure. I mean, I’m on it right now. I’d enjoy it more if it wasn’t full of terfs and nazis. But the path to a better internet starts with building a better society. Which starts by redefining what we mean when we say we.
Source: Mike Monteiro’s Good News
Ben Werdmuller created ShareOpenly to make it easier to share web content, such as blog posts, to the newer crop of social media sites. Happily, he’s announced that there’s now a nifty icon and a WordPress plugin. I’ve installed the latter over at my personal blog.
In related news, publishing platform Ghost has started work on their ActivityPub integration. This is the protocol that allows social media sites such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Micro.blog (which powers this blog) to talk to one another.
ShareOpenlyIt’s been a little over a month since I launched ShareOpenly, my simple tool that lets you add a “share to social media” button to your website which is compatible with the fediverse, Bluesky, Threads, and all of today’s crop of social media sites.
You might recall that I built it in order to help people move away from their “share to Twitter” buttons that they’ve been hosting for years. Those buttons made sense from 2006-2022 — but not so much in a world where engagement on Twitter/X is falling, and a new world of social media is emerging.
Source: werd.io
I had a chat with John Willshire today from Smithery and while we were talking he mentioned a few resources and books:
I’ve got too much art waiting to go up in my new house to be buying more at the moment, but I’m very tempted by these exquisite wood engraving prints from emeritus professor John Altringham, an ecologist and conservation scientist.
In particular, the one I’ve featured for this post is of a place in my home county of Northumberland that I’ve never visited: Cullernose Point. It also has given me some ideas for some mountain expeditions, something that I really need in my life at the moment.
Source: John Altringham
Silvio Lorusso’s ‘intervention’ during Domus Academy’s roundtable is well worth a read. He talks about the need to, in some ways fight complexity as more of a cultural practice than a practical framework. How useful is it, he wonders, to point to something as ‘complex’? Is it mostly of help to professionals seeking to assert authority and control?
Disciplines are arbitrary compartments of knowledge: they strategically define their boundaries in order to demarcate some particular problems and solve them, or at least address them. Sociology, for example, was born in the early 19th century to address the problem (and, therefore, problems) of society. However, disciplines won’t meekly confine themselves within their artificial boundary; rather, their internal discourse will push the border, extending it. This tendency is especially evident in the design field, where you often hear that “everything is design”.
Besides the physiological swelling of the disciplines, we witness a phenomenon which is historically specific. Martin Oppenheimer (quoted by philosopher Donald Schön) called it a “proletarianization of the professions”. When everyone can call themselves a professional, the reputational and financial returns of being one shrink. Furthermore, there is a tangible distrust toward the figure of the expert. Just think of the field of economy or virology…
So, what do professionals do to regain prestige? They accelerate the expansion of the disciplinary confines, creating connections in an almost conspiratorial, apophenic mode. Carlo Bramanti, who is currently working on the notion of “conspiratorial design”, points out not only the visual but also the conceptual similarities between diagrams made by legitimized design figures like Victor Papanek and paranoid-style infographics about “Covid 5G” by an obscure graphic artist named Dylan Louis Monroe. What do they have a in common? They want to produce and project a sense of control on the messiness of the world (Richard Hofstadter: “the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities”). How do they do so? By means of hypertrophy: by adding always more relations to their system, which becomes a totalizing one: it becomes the system.
This is why complexity is ultimately a reassuring category. Reassuring to whom? To the professionals, who are there to explain and clarify it, to seal it with “the authoritative stain of scientific enquiry”, as Georgina Voss puts it. And there is a further paradox. Do you remember the Game of Thrones “It’s not that simple” meme? Well, to reassure themselves, experts will have an incentive to expand their system of reference, and therefore create more links and relationships. This leads to the ever-increasingly intricate diagrams, to what Voss calls “the airport-bookshop model of systems thinking which tends to involve a lot of graphs and urges to ‘shift your mindset’”. But by adding links and relationships one doesn’t necessarily reach galaxy brain level. More likely they will just generate more confusion, more noise, more chaos.
Source: Entreprecariat
Image: Bucky’s Nightmare by Mathieu Lehanneur.
Laura often says that online communities don’t exist on a single platform, but all over the web. They might seem to have a ‘home’ in one place, but conversations and hashtags to gather around are distributed.
Twitter, says Alan Levine, was an anomaly in that regard. It felt like a ‘public square’ even though it was owned by a private company. As I said a decade ago, ‘software with shareholders’ is a problem. Something to avoid.
Now, I spend most of my social time on the Fediverse, but it’s not a place where I talk much about my professional work. That seems to have moved to LinkedIn, more from necessity than choice. It’s not a great state of affairs; I wish it were different. But here we are.
There is a myth. Cue the string section.
That there was once a place for all to gather, share, be festive, develop new connections, every course a hashtag, topple a few governments, people power.
Then came an evil billionaire who ruined it all, those who gathered were cast out, a diaspora.
No end.
Yes the Musky One was/is a horrible scourge, but all he did was hasten a decline. The birdhouse he bought was already uwinding in the mid 2010s with more algorithim cruft, more ads, more malfeasents. In my 2016 year end post, having been one of the world’s stupefied witness to the script of a reaility show election right out of the Black Mirror
[…]
It’s too simple, too convenient to scapegoat it all on that smelly tyrant, the reason for the dispersion is we dispersed. And it’s not a platform thing, it’s that thing in our hands.
Source: CogDogBlog
This is a masterpiece in defending yourself while taking the high ground and explaining to your audience what it is that you actually do. Brownlee is an amazing communicator and there’s a reason why he’s got one of the most-watched YouTube channels.
Amy Daniels-Moehle shared a link to this during the ORE community call yesterday. She’s been doing some kind of intensive course with the International Bateson Institute and mentioned the concept of ‘warm data’.
Nora Bateson explains the origin and need for warm data in this short video. It’s definitely something I need to explore further, perhaps as part of my studies towards a MSc in Systems Thinking.
The International Bateson Institute exists to generate and give access to information that offers a wider vision. The focus of inquiry is on the interrelational processes between and among systems. It can involve recognising how patterns repeat and reflect each other among multiple contexts and across multiple systems – many of these systems’maintenance and renewal is critical in the coming decades.
The underlying premise of the IBI is to address and experiment with how we perceive. Our work is to look in other ways so that we might find other species of information and new patterns of connection not visible though current methodologies.
We call this information “Warm Data”.
This timelapse, which was shared by the social media account Wonder of Science is just fantastic. It’s a timelapse capturing an entire night from sunset to sunrise over the ALMA Observatory on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Atacama Desert by Christoph Malin.
More information on the European Southern Observatory website.
This is pretty great: you upload the image and it creates a pretty detailed text description, along with more concise alt text. I’ve previously been using GPT-4 for this, but this is more focused and useful.
Source: Arizona State University
How much influence do parents have on their children? Less than we’d assume, it appears.
I have to say, much to my shame, that it’s taken me a long time to realise how different my own kids are to me. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as I’m quite different from my own parents. Although, of course, there are some pretty huge overlaps in our interests, but that’s to be expected, given how much time we’ve spent together.
[P]sychologists have known for ages that parents and children don’t particularly share the “big five” personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism). It is getting attention now because of a study that tried to change the way this question of family similarity is explored. Rather than participants only self-reporting their personality traits, they also chose a third party who knew them well to assess them.
This novel approach suggested more similarity between parents and offspring – approximately 40% rather than the 25% of previous studies. But that is still very low. The study concluded that it was “impossible to accurately predict a child’s personality traits from those of their mother or father” and that most relatives are not “much more similar than strangers”.
Huh. So it’s just our pattern-seeking brains that make us think little Timmy is “cheeky like his dad”; you might as well say he is “cheeky like that gull”. As a parent, this felt like a weight lifted: if my kids are like me (God help them), it’s not my fault – just dumb luck. The same study’s findings on the impact of home environment felt good, too: “Growing up together does not make people more similar.”
[…]
But parents aren’t entirely off the hook. Last year, a study of 9,400 11- to 17-year-olds declared: “Parent personalities have a significant impact on a child’s life.” The detailed results concluded: “Kids with neurotic parents scored relatively low on several measures, including grades, overall health, body mass index … and time spent on leisure activities.” (Sorry, kids, but it’s not just me and my fellow neurotics getting guilted: extroverts’ offspring also get worse grades.)
It would be bizarre if the people who raised us had no influence on how we turned out, but surely we will never understand with any clarity how our parents screw us up and how we screw up our kids in turn. There are too many variables; how could you ever work out what makes us who we are, what is innate and what isn’t? As one psychologist has put it, the most direct way to weigh nature against nurture is “to randomly assign children to parents”.
Source: The Guardian
Sara Hendren discusses what I would call ‘creative constraints’ as applied to organisational policies. For example, a coffee shop she knows that has a no-laptops policy which is “gently, but strictly, enforced” changes the vibe:
A no-laptops policy means you can’t get a certain kind of work done, but it does mean everyone present will be a little more eyes-up-and-talking, or maybe absorbed by a book or notebook. The activities will be at the speed of the body, one to another. Is it nostalgic and precious? Maybe. But it’s not the only café in town to make this move, and I think there’s some signal there. Faro started out with no-laptops only on weekends, and the policy was welcome enough to make it a daily norm. Over at Zuzu’s Petals, it’s no devices of any kind.
Source: undefended / undefeated
Jim Neilsen uses a Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation as a jumping-off point to discuss something important:
I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
To me, all of those people with super-intricate systems, whether for academic work, pleasure, or something inbetween are faintly ridiculous. The point isn’t to replicate a machine and remember everything you’ve ever read.
Neilsen writes:
It’s a good reminder to be mindful of my content diet — you are what you eat read, even if you don’t always remember it.
For me, I bookmark a bunch of stuff that I never get to reading properly. Some of it ends up here on Thought Shrapnel in a way that I can process and search through at a later date. The added bonus is that you, dear reader, also get to see it too.
Source: Jim Neilsen’s Blog
Image: Olga Thelavart
This is a bit of a strange ramble-post which largely rehashes the discussion/debate we’ve been having for over 15 years about the qualitative difference between reading on screens versus reading on paper. The difference is that there is the added layer of moral panic about people reading fewer books.
What is rarely included in this kind of thing is that we are emerging from what Walter Ong called the Gutenberg Parenthesis, a time in which the written word dominated. That wasn’t true before the printing press, and it’s unlikely to be true going forward given the preponderance of new media. This post-Gutenberg phase is known as ‘secondary orality’ as it depends upon literate culture.
I will always prefer the written word, mainly because it’s more information dense than video and audio content. But there’s room for everything without endless hand-wringing.
The e-reading apps have their merits. At times, they become respites from the other, more addictive apps on my phone. Switching to a book from, say, Twitter, is like the phone-scroller’s version of a nice hike—the senses reorient themselves, and you feel more alert and vigorous, because you’ve spent six to eight minutes going from seven to eleven per cent of Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.” Or you might feel a sense of pride because you’ve reached the sixty-per-cent mark in Elton John’s autobiography, “Me,” which isn’t a great work of literature but at least is better than Twitter. The book apps also seem to work as a stopgap for children, who are always lusting after screen time of any sort. My seven-year-old daughter has read hundreds of books on the Libby app, which lets you check out e-books from public libraries you belong to. As a parent, I find this wildly preferable to hearing the din of yet another stupid YouTube short or “Is it Cake?” episode coming through her iPad’s speakers.
Still, the arrival of these technologies has been accompanied by a steady decline in the number of books that get read in any form. A pair of 1999 Gallup polls, for example, found that Americans, on average, had read 18.5 books in the course of the previous twelve months. (It should be noted that these were books people had read, or said they had read, “either all or part of the way through.”) By 2021, the number had fallen to 12.6. In 2023, a National Endowment for the Arts survey found that the share of American adults who read novels or short stories had declined from 45.2 per cent in 2012 to 37.6 per cent in 2022, a record low. There are plenty of theories about why this is happening, involving broad finger-pointing toward the Internet or the ongoing influence of television, or even shifting labor conditions, as more women have entered the workforce.
Source: The New Yorker
Solid advice here.
You aren’t famous. Anything you do or create will probably receive little to no attention, so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
[…]
The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work.
In the end, find something you enjoy doing and just do it because you enjoy it. If you have to, make some goals for yourself, but never for your “audience”.
Source: Ash Newman
Image: Elena Mozhvilo
I just had to post this image, which I discovered via the Fediverse. It’s definitely a riposte to all of those people who say that people who have been underserved and marginalised by a biased system should “try harder,” “be more resilient,” or “show more grit”.
This is a PSA to be careful out there: deepfakes have come to regular, real-time video calls. People are getting scammed.
The Yahoo Boys have been experimenting with deepfake video clips for around two years and shifted to more real-time deepfake video calls over the last year, says David Maimon, a professor at Georgia State University and the head of fraud insights at identity verification firm SentiLink. Maimon has monitored the Yahoo Boys on Telegram for more than four years and shared dozens of videos with WIRED revealing how the scammers are using deepfakes.
[…]
The Yahoo Boys’ live deepfake calls run in two different ways. In the first, shown above, the scammers use a setup of two phones and a face-swapping app. The scammer holds the phone they are calling their victim with—they’re mostly seen using Zoom, Maimon says, but it can work on any platform—and uses its rear camera to record the screen of a second phone. This second phone has its camera pointing at the scammer’s face and is running a face-swapping app. They often place the two phones on stands to ensure they don’t move and use ring lights to improve conditions for a real-time face-swap, the videos show.
The second common tactic… uses a laptop instead of a phone. (WIRED has blurred real faces in both videos.) Here, the scammer uses a webcam to capture their face and software running on the laptop changes their appearance. Videos of the setup show scammers are able to see their own face alongside the altered deepfake, with just the manipulated image being displayed over the live video call.
[…]
Some of the Yahoo Boy videos are unbelievable, obvious fakes, while others appear plausible. When they’re viewed live, on a mobile phone, with unstable connections, any obvious flaws may be masked—especially if a scammer has spent months social-engineering their victim.
[…]
Ronnie Tokazowski, the chief fraud fighter at Intelligence for Good, which works with cybercrime victims, says because the Yahoo Boys have used deepfakes for romance scams, they’ll pivot to using the technology for their other scams. “This is kind of an early warning where it’s like: ‘OK, they’re really good at doing these things. Now, what’s the next thing they’re going to do?’”
Source: WIRED
This is, as you’d expect, a restrained article from the BBC. But it still flies in the face of the government’s talk of a ‘sick note culture’ in the UK. Instead, as anyone lives here will attest, it’s the financial crisis, Brexit, and the pandemic, compounded by repeated government failure — including underfunding the NHS.
Research by the Health Foundation shows there are as many people aged 16 to 64 in work whose health limits what they can do as they are out of work because of ill-health.
Overall, it estimates nearly a fifth of the working-age population in the UK has what it calls a work-limiting condition.
In fact, the think tank believes the problem has become so bad that it is threatening the economic potential of the country.
[…]
So why are working-age people so ill? Christopher Rocks, who heads up the Health Foundation’s work in this area, says it is a “complicated” picture.
He says while there has been a lot of focus on the issue since the pandemic, the trend has actually been developing for the past decade at least.
“The 2008 financial crisis had a major impact on society - we saw an economic downturn and public spending cuts. That had an impact on people’s health in many different ways. The pandemic and subsequent cost of living crisis exacerbated trends, but the signs were there before Covid hit.
“Access to health care has become more difficult, while those fundamental building blocks of health - such as good housing and adequate incomes - are under strain.”
How that has affected people varies depending on their age and where they live. Research published this week warned the numbers with major illness was set to increase significantly. with the people in the most deprived areas suffering the most - many with multiple conditions.
The work, also published by the Health Foundation, found there were three main conditions causing a significant burden of ill-health: chronic pain, type 2 diabetes and mental health problems. Each is a reflection of the different challenges facing the country.
Source: BBC News
Elle Griffin digged into the details of a court case from 2022 that involved Penguin Random House attempting to acquire another publishing house, Simon & Schuster. Some of the details shared are eye-opening.
I don’t think the models used by the book industry, or the academic publishing industry, are long for this world.
I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
[…]
The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
[…]
Having a lot of social media followers or fame doesn’t guarantee it will sell. The singer Billie Eilish, despite her 97 million Instagram followers and 6 million Twitter followers, sold only 64,000 copies within eight months of publishing her book. The singer Justin Timberlake sold only 100,000 copies in the three years after he published his book. Snoop Dog’s cookbook saw a boost during the pandemic, but he still only sold 205,000 copies in 2020.
[…]
The publishing houses may live to see another day, but I don’t think their model is long for this world. Unless you are a celebrity or franchise author, the publishing model won’t provide a whole lot more than a tiny advance and a dozen readers. If you are a celebrity, you’ll still have a much bigger reach on Instagram than you will with your book!
Personally, I could not be more grateful to skip the publishing houses altogether and write directly for my readers here, being supported by those who read this newsletter rather than by a publishing advance that won’t ultimately translate to people reading my work.
Source: The Elysian
Image: Tom Hermans
What I appreciate about Drew Austin’s writing is how concisely he can string together important points. Go and read the three long paragraphs of this post, which I’ve summarised out of order below.
My understanding is that Austin is saying that our mental model of social media is out of kilter with the current reality. We’re pretending that the current landscape is in any way similar to that of a decade ago.
[A] 2021 essay, The Brazilianization of the World by Alex Hochuli, describes how “the fate of being modern but not modern enough now seems to be shared by large parts of the world: WhatsApp and favelas, e-commerce and open sewers.” As a small cohort of venal elites separates itself, physically and socially, from the much larger and poorer population in which it’s embedded, it creates an idea of interior and exterior existence. The Twitch streamer with no audience anticipates life on the outside, in the dead public space of a Brazilianized, enclave-gated internet, a ground that shifted under our feet with little warning, turning us into street buskers playing music we didn’t realize no one could hear.
[…]
Talking to no one is the near future of social media, the digital equivalent of warming your hands over an oil drum bonfire in an abandoned city—what you do when you missed the last bus out of town and have to loiter as comfortably as possible in the ruins. We may have once imagined that social media would ultimately end by imploding suddenly, releasing us from the last day of school into a summer of the real, but no such catharsis is coming. When institutions die now, they rarely give us the closure of ceasing to exist—they live on in zombie form, and we learn to tolerate the gradually worsening conditions they impose. We stick around Twitter because we need to for professional reasons, we may tell ourselves, but the real job is just scavenging copper wires from the wreckage.
Source: Kneeling Bus
Image: Patrick Busslinger
It would be remiss of me not to mark the extraordinary achievement of Russell “Hardest Geezer” Cook, who has run the entire length of Africa. This interactive map not only charts the daily progress he made, but links to his social media accounts.
My favourite part of the story, which backs up his nickname, comes when he had scans due to persistent back pain. Finding no bone damage, he concluded that “the only option left was to stop mincing about like a little weasel, get the strongest painkillers available and zombie stomp road again”.
Incredible.
The 27-year-old from Worthing, West Sussex, said he had struggled with his mental health, gambling and drinking, and wanted to “make a difference”.
After running through 16 countries, he has raised in excess of £700,000 for charity and has completed his final run.
As he crossed the finish line at about 16:40 BST in Ras Angela, Tunisia, Mr Cook was greeted by a shouting crowd, with many chanting “geezer”.
“I’m pretty tired,” he told reporters and in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Source: BBC News
A new paper in Nature suggests that writing down your feelings of anger and then disposing of the piece of paper can rid yourself of the angry feelings. Interestingly, or tellingly, the paper starts by talking about parental anger and the importance of demonstrating emotional self-regulation.
I’ve done something similar in terms of emotional processing with my own kids. For example, when my son was around four years old, the bird hide in the park behind our house was set on fire deliberately. An act of arson. He was inconsolable, and had nightmares. I got him to draw a picture of what had happened and to use it to talk about what happened, which seemed to be cathartic.
Anger suppression is important in our daily life, as its failure can sometimes lead to the breaking down of relationships in families. Thus, effective strategies to suppress or neutralise anger have been examined. This study shows that physical disposal of a piece of paper containing one’s written thoughts on the cause of a provocative event neutralises anger, while holding the paper did not. In this study, participants wrote brief opinions about social problems and received a handwritten, insulting comment consisting of low evaluations about their composition from a confederate. Then, the participants wrote the cause and their thoughts about the provocative event. Half of the participants (disposal group) disposed of the paper in the trash can (Experiment 1) or in the shredder (Experiment 2), while the other half (retention group) kept it in a file on the desk. All the participants showed an increased subjective rating of anger after receiving the insulting feedback. However, the subjective anger for the disposal group decreased as low as the baseline period, while that of the retention group was still higher than that in the baseline period in both experiments. We propose this method as a powerful and simple way to eliminate anger.
Source: Nature
I stumbled across a Wikipedia page entitled ‘List of unusual deaths’. I was only going to share three of them, but there are so many bizarre ones on there that I couldn’t help sharing more.
Sigurd the Mighty of Orkney (892 CE): The second Earl of Orkney strapped the head of his defeated foe Máel Brigte to his horse’s saddle. Brigte’s teeth rubbed against Sigurd’s leg as he rode, causing a fatal infection, according to the Old Norse Heimskringla and Orkneyinga sagas.
Hans Staininger (1567): The burgomaster of Braunau (then Bavaria, now Austria), died when he broke his neck by tripping over his own beard. The beard, which was 4.5 feet (1.4 m) long at the time, was usually kept rolled up in a leather pouch.
Thomas Otway (1685): The English dramatist fell on hard times and was suffering from poverty in his later years, and was driven by starvation to beg for food. A gentleman who recognized him gave him a guinea, with which he hastened to a baker’s shop, purchased a roll, and choked to death on the first mouthful.
John Cummings (1809): After seeing a circus knife-swallower, seaman John Cummings began actually swallowing knives. On one occasion, he swallowed four knives, and quickly passed three with no ill-health. He later swallowed 14 knives, and after some days with abdominal pain, he passed all of them. He finally swallowed 20 knives and a clasp knife case, but after a few days, he had only passed the case; he died after four years in pain. On autopsy, a knife blade and spring were found in his intestines, and between 30 and 40 fragments of metal, wood, and horn in his stomach.
Mathilda of Austria (1867): The daughter of Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen set her dress on fire while trying to hide a cigarette from her father, who had forbidden her to smoke.
Sir William Payne-Gallwey, 2nd Baronet (1881): The former British MP died after sustaining severe internal injuries when he fell on a turnip while hunting.
Thornton Jones (1924): The lawyer from Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales, woke up to find that he had his throat slit. Motioning for a paper and pencil, he wrote, “I dreamt that I had done it. I awoke to find it true”, and died 80 minutes later. He had done it himself while unconscious. An inquest at Bangor delivered a verdict of “suicide while temporarily insane”.
Isadora Duncan (1927): The American dancer broke her neck in Nice, France when her long scarf became entangled in the open-spoked wheel and rear axle of the Amilcar CGSS automobile in which she was riding.
David Grundman (1982): While shooting at cacti with his shotgun near Lake Pleasant Regional Park, Arizona, he was crushed when a 4-foot (1.2 m) limb detached and fell on him.
Vladimir Likhonos (2009): The 25-year-old student of Kyiv Polytechnic Institute from Konotop was killed when his chewing gum exploded. He had a habit of dipping his chewing gum in citric acid to increase the gum’s sour taste. On his work table police found about 100 grams (3.5 oz) of unidentified explosive powder which he used for chemistry studies at home. It resembled citric acid, and it is thought that he confused the two, having accidentally coated his gum in the explosive powder before chewing it. The explosive was found to be four times stronger than TNT, and the explosion was possibly triggered either by reacting with Likhonos’s saliva, or the pressure exerted by him chewing on the gum and explosive powder.
Ilda Vitor Maciel (2012): The 88-year old died in a hospital in Barra Mansa, Rio de Janeiro, allegedly as a result of nursing technicians injecting soup through her intravenous drip instead of her feeding tube.
Sam Ballard (2018): The 29-year old from Sydney, Australia, died from angiostrongyliasis after eating a garden slug as a dare eight years earlier.
Shivdayal Sharma (2023): The 82-year-old was reportedly urinating next to a train track in the region of Alwar, India, when a cow was hit by the Vande Bharat express train. The animal was launched 100 feet (30 m) into the air before landing on Sharma, killing him instantly.
Source: Wikipedia
Image: The death of Aeschylus, killed by a turtle dropped onto his head by a falcon
This article in Aeon is the first time I’ve come across the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler who owned a jazz club which was shut down for illegal prostitution, and developed his philosophy of ‘technics’ while in prison for armed robbery.
Stiegler saw technics as the foundation of human existence, influencing our future possibilities and our sense of being. His view was that acknowledging the role of technology is essential to understand our reality and imagine alternative futures. He believed that while technology has the potential to standardise and limit our experiences, it also offers the ability to reshape human identity and cultural practices positively.
One to explore further, especially in terms of his idea of a pharmacology of digital tools.
In the late 20th century, Stiegler began applying [his ideas] to new media technologies, such as television, which led to the development of a concept he called pharmacology – an idea that suggests we don’t simply ‘use’ our digital tools. Instead, they enter and pharmacologically change us, like medicinal drugs. Today, we can take this analogy even further. The internet presents us with a massive archive of formatted, readily accessible information. Sites such as Wikipedia contain terabytes of knowledge, accumulated and passed down over millennia. At the same time, this exchange of unprecedented amounts of information enables the dissemination of an unprecedented amount of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content. The digital is both a poison and a cure, as Derrida would say.
This kind of polyvalence led Stiegler to think more deliberately about technics rather than technology. For Stiegler, there are inherent risks in thinking in terms of the latter: the more ubiquitous that digital technologies become in our lives, the easier it is to forget that these tools are social products that have been constructed by our fellow humans. How we consume music, the paths we take to get from point A to point B, how we share ourselves with others, all of these aspects of daily life have been reshaped by new technologies and the humans that produce them. Yet we rarely stop to reflect on what this means for us. Stiegler believed this act of forgetting creates a deep crisis for all facets of human experience. By forgetting, we lose our all-important capacity to imagine alternative ways of living. The future appears limited, even predetermined, by new technology.
[…]
The pharmacology of technics, for Stiegler, presents opportunities for positive or negative relationships with tools. ‘But where the danger lies,’ writes the poet Friedrich Hölderlin in a quote Stiegler often turned to, ‘also grows the saving power.’ While Derrida focuses on the ability of the written word to subvert the sovereignty of the individual subject, Stiegler widens this understanding of pharmacology to include a variety of media and technologies. Not just writing, but factories, server farms and even psychotropic drugs possess the pharmacological capacity to poison or cure our world and, crucially, our understanding of it. Technological development can destroy our sense of ourselves as rational, coherent subjects, leading to widespread suffering and destruction. But tools can also provide us with a new sense of what it means to be human, leading to new modes of expression and cultural practices.
[…]
Technical innovations are never without political and social implications for Stiegler. The phonograph, for example, may have standardised classical musical performances after its invention in the late 1800s, but it also contributed to the development of jazz, a genre that was popular among musicians who were barred from accessing the elite world of classical music. Thanks to the gramophone, Black musicians such as the pianist and composer Duke Ellington were able to learn their instruments by ear, without first learning to read musical notation. The phonograph’s industrialisation of musical performance paradoxically led to the free-flowing improvisation of jazz performers.
Source: [Aeon](aeon.co/essays/be…
This is an interesting post by Ian Betteridge, mainly because of the point he makes at the end about disinformation leading to a retreat behind paywalls. I think it’s inevitable that any open/social space without a governance model that specifically focuses on high-quality moderation (rather than increasing ‘shareholder value’) will have problems.
The answer is retreating to people we know and trust, but this doesn’t have to be in dark forests. We can use decentralised moderation models such as Bluesky and others are developing. My main concern is that we reach peak disinformation during an important election year before these mitigating technologies come to fruition.
“Grey goo” was a concept which emerged when nanotechnology was the hot new thing. First put forward by Eric Drexler in his 1986 book The Engines of Creation, this is the idea that self-replicating nanobots could go out of control and consume all the resources on Earth, turning everything into a grey mass of nanomachines.
Few people worry about a nanotech apocalypse now, but arguably we should be worried about AI having a very similar effect on the internet.
[…]
It is obvious that anywhere content can be created will ultimately be flooded with AI-generated words and pictures. And the pace of this could accelerate over the coming years, as the tools to use LLMs programmatically become more complex.
[…]
This is the AI Grey Goo scenario: an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources for information because the tools we have been able to rely on in the past – Google, social media – can never keep up with the scale of new content being created. Where the volume of content created overwhelms human or algorithmic abilities to sift through it quickly and find high-quality stuff.
[…]
With reliable information locked behind paywalls, anyone unwilling or unable to pay will be faced with picking through a rubbish heap of disinformation, scams, and low-quality nonsense.
In 2022, talking about the retreat behind paywalls, Jeff Jarvis asked “when disinformation is free, how can we restrict quality information to the privileged who choose to afford it?” If the AI-driven information grey goo scenario comes to pass, things would be much, much worse.
Source: [Ian Betteridge](ianbetteridge.com/2024/01/2…
My maternal grandmother was so paranoid about having a poor posture that she put a bamboo pole behind her back, and rested her wrists over the top of each side. The idea was to keep a straight back into old age. She did well to worry, as her sister, my Great Aunt, had osteoporosis. Of course, no amount of posture-correcting exercise is going to help you if your bones start crumbling.
This article in TIME is interesting in that it problematising the history of the posture-correcting ‘industry’ (for want of a better term). TL;DR: there’s no single, correct posture. Thank goodness for that.
By the mid 20th century, poor posture came to be seen as the culprit for rising rates of low back pain, even though little hard evidence existed to prove such claims of causality. President John F. Kennedy, who had repeated back surgeries and chronic pain, hired his own personal posture guru, Hans Kraus, a man who would go on to create one of the most well-known posture and fitness tests administered to hundreds of thousands public school children throughout the Cold War. It was in this cultural and political context of containment that uprightness became a symbol of patriotism, heterosexual propriety, and individualist strength, all virtues believed to be needed in order to defeat the threat of communism.
[…]
On the face of it, posture improvement campaigns may seem rather innocuous. What is the harm, after all, of engaging in posture exercise programs? Of buying chairs, shoes, and devices that help to encourage it?
On an individual level, it is entirely possible that an enhanced sense of wellness can come from taking up yoga or purchasing an ergonomic chair. But when looking at the long history of posture improvement campaigns from an historical and structural standpoint, it becomes evident how value-laden they are, and how they can perpetuate sexism, ableism, and racism.
[…]
A recent study published by physical therapists working in Qatar, Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom speaks to the urgent need of the profession to dispel the medicalized myth that poor posture leads to bad health. “People come in different shapes and sizes,” they write, “with natural variation in spinal curvatures.”
In short, there is no single, correct posture. Nor does posture correction necessarily ensure future health. Maybe it’s ok to slouch from time to time, after all.
Source: TIME
About 15 years ago, local residents where we used to live conned into backing (or at least not opposing) wind turbines being installed close to a residential area. The marketing materials included details of a proposed five-star hotel and golf course, which the developers said would help with tourism. Only the wind turbines were built, the developer “going bust” afterwards. I couldn’t stand the noise of the turbines, and it’s one of the reasons we moved.
It seems a similar kind of bait-and-switch is happening with the much-hyped Neom project in Saudi Arabia, a plan which I thought looked pretty dystopian in the launch video. I may be cynical, but perhaps they never intended to built it all? Perhaps it was meant to deflect attention away from their petro-checmical ambitions, sportswashing, and human rights abuses? It is a huge surprise to me that they built the luxury tourist destination part first. Huge.
Saudi Arabia has scaled back its medium-term ambitions for the desert development of Neom, the biggest project within Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plans for diversifying the oil-dependent economy, according to people familiar with the matter.
By 2030, the government at one point hoped to have 1.5 million residents living in The Line, a sprawling, futuristic city it plans to contain within a pair of mirror-clad skyscrapers. Now, officials expect the development will house fewer than 300,000 residents by that time, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Officials have long said The Line would be built in stages and they expect it to ultimately cover a 170-kilometer stretch of desert along the coast. With the latest pullback, though, officials expect to have just 2.4 kilometers of the project completed by 2030, the person familiar with the matter said, who asked not to be named discussing non-public information.
Source: Bloomberg
This cartoon is exactly the scenario I’m concerned about happening to the planet we call home. I’m going to juxtapose it with a quotation from William Shatner, the actor best known for his role in Star Trek and who finally got to go to space in 2021
Last year, at the age of 90, I had a life-changing experience. I went to space, after decades of playing a science-fiction character who was exploring the universe and building connections with many diverse life forms and cultures. I thought I would experience a similar feeling: a feeling of deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration. A call to indeed boldly go where no one had gone before.
I was absolutely wrong. As I explained in my latest book, what I felt was totally different. I knew that many before me had experienced a greater sense of care while contemplating our planet from above, because they were struck by the apparent fragility of this suspended blue marble. I felt that too. But the strongest feeling, dominating everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.
While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.
This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I played my part in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.
Image: Tjeerd Royaards
Text: The Guardian
I can’t remember where I came across it, but I’ve bookmarked both a YouTube video and the Wikipedia article for the signature style of Japanese animator Ichirō Itano.
Not only is it awesome in its own right, I think I’m correct in saying that the person who mentioned it was using it as a metaphor for attacking something from multiple angles. Which is also fantastic.
Itano is best known among anime fans for a style of action scene that he developed, usually nicknamed “Itano Circus” (板野サーカス, Itano sākasu) or “Macross missile massacre” by fans; it refers to a highly stylized and acrobatic method of depicting aerial combat and dogfights in many anime, particularly the Macross series.
The battle scenes of the conventional mecha animation took the style of “duel” using guns and swords such as Western (genre) and Jidaigeki and there were many staging which emphasized the heaviness and posing (decision pose) of the robot. A good example of this is sword fight in battle scenes such as Gundam. He created new scenes with the acrobatic moves.
Source: Ichirō Itano
Gif from video: “It’s The Circus”
It remains a source of frustration to me that my kids support Liverpool. They’ve never been to a home game, and (I suspect) only chose them because they’re a good team in the Premier League, my wife being born there gave them an excuse, and my team (Sunderland) were doing terribly during their early years.
Of course, you can support whatever football team you like. But, as my mate Adam bangs on about all of the time, big money in football has corrupted the game.
[T]here are two concurrent developments taking place here. The first is the gradual realignment of fan hierarchy along the lines of one’s ability to pay: a development years in the making but now reaching a kind of tipping point amid rising prices and declining living standards. In his typically empathic and erudite way, Postecoglou was countering an argument that didn’t really exist. Nobody is discussing restricting access to foreign fans, who have always been able to rock up and buy a ticket. But in romanticising the devotion of the wealthy, amid price hikes that have enraged longstanding Spurs fans, Postecoglou offered up a justification that Daniel Levy and the corporate press office could scarcely have scripted more perfectly.
The other is the gradual erosion of the big club fanbase as a place of congregation and common ground. Broadening a fanbase also weakens it, weakens the ties that bind fans to each other, weakens their inclination to unite and organise. The mass of (mostly domestic-based) Manchester United fans resisting the sale of their club to a Qatari bidder were met by an equal and opposite wave of (mostly foreign-based) fans backing the Qatari bid. Meanwhile, how can we expect Chelsea fans to resist a future Super League if they can no longer even agree on whether Armando Broja is any good?
Source: The Guardian
Image: travis jones
I’ll not do this often, and I obviously encourage you to read the original article, but here’s a GPT-4 summary of a fantastic post by Adam Mastroianni from the start of the year.
His topic is getting yourself out of a situation where you’re stuck, which he calls “de-bogging yourself”. I love the way he breaks it down into three different kinds of ‘bog phenomena’ and gives names to examples which fall into those categories.
Insufficient Activation Energy: Describes a lack of motivation to change, encompassing scenarios such as taking on unwanted projects (gutterballing), waiting for a perfect solution (waiting for jackpot), avoiding necessary actions out of fear (declining the dragon), and remaining in mediocre situations due to a lack of motivation to change (the mediocrity trap). Additionally, it covers obsessing over problems without seeking solutions (stroking the problem).
Bad Escape Plans: Details flawed strategies for change, including the belief that mere effort without direction will lead to improvement (the “try harder” fallacy), unrealistic expectations of future effort (the infinite effort illusion), blaming external factors (blaming God), misunderstanding the nature of problems (diploma vs. toothbrushing problems), expecting personal transformation without basis (fantastical metamorphosis), and attempting to control others' actions (puppeteering).
A Bog of One’s Own: Explores self-imposed psychological barriers to progress, such as overvaluing insignificant details (obsessing over tiny predictors) and holding unrealistic views of personal and others' problems (personal problems growth ray). It also discusses the detrimental effects of constant worry over external issues (super surveillance) and refusal to accept simple solutions (hedgehogging), culminating in the belief that personal satisfaction is unattainable (impossible satisfaction).
Source: Experimental History
Image: Maksim Shutov
Via Garbage Day, this chart shows that The New York Times is more of a gaming platform than a news platform, in terms of time spent by visitors to their apps.
Remember when they bought Wordle? That was right at the end of January 2022 and here we are a couple of years later with games being a major driver of eyeballs on news sites.
This is inevitable, I guess, given that the majority of people get their news via headlines on social media, and that news sites increasingly have paywalls or login-gates. Still interesting though.
I am very excited about this chart because, as I wrote last month, The New York Times is a tech platform now, but, specifically, they’re a gaming platform. Which I always suspected would be the Next Big Thing in digital media and I’ve been desperate for example of how it would work.
You can track stages of internet development by the evolution of the web portal. And the biggest publishers tend to operate downstream and also mimic those portals. In the read-only age of AOL and Yahoo, you had static news sites. In the search and social age of Facebook and Google, you had aggregation and viral media. And the new age coming into focus right now is almost certainly led by interactive entertainment platforms. Entire ecosystems built around videos and games. And, like it or not, the next Pop Crave will be inside of Fortnite or, possibly, own their own version of it.
Source: Garbage Day
M.E. Rothwell’s Cosmographia is a frequent delight, and his latest missive really hits my sweet spot: an unknown history, a huge structure, and a bit of a mystery. I encourage you to go and read the whole thing, or at least just look at the wonderful illustrations.
Borobudur is the largest and most elaborate Buddhist temple in the entire world. Yet its origins remain a mystery.
The temple lies in central Java, Indonesia, surrounded by thick jungle and a ring of mountains. It’s suspected its construction, amid an area with no traces of any other ancient buildings, palaces, or cities, may have been begun by the Shailendra and/or Sanjaya dynasties of 8th century Java. It’s estimated one million stones, each weighing 100kg each, were mined from a nearby riverbed in order to build the stupa, which contains 504 statues of the Buddha and almost 3000 carved stone reliefs.
No one quite knows why such a vast Buddhist edifice was built in a primarily Hindu area, some 5000km away from the centre of Buddhist thought. It’s not even known what precise function it served. The sophisticated civilisation that birthed it went into a sudden and mysterious decline within a century of the temple’s completion in the mid-9th century.
[…]
[T]he temple was ‘rediscovered’ by the man with the most British name of all time — Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles. As Governor General of the Dutch East Indies between 1811 and 1816, Raffles took great interest in the history of the island. After he heard about the existence of a huge monument deep in the jungle, he dispatched Dutch engineer Hermann Cornelius to investigate. It took his team two months to cut back the undergrowth to reveal the extent of the huge temple complex.
Source: Cosmographia
I might pay for Noah Smith’s publication if it weren’t on Substack. While it’s a shame that I may never see the bit beyond the paywall of this article, there’s enough in the bit I can enough read to be thought-provoking.
He riffs off a Twitter thread by Mark Allan Bovair who points to 2015 when lots of people started to be extremely online. This changed society greatly because we started understanding the world through a political lens, both online and offline. (Although there isn’t really an ‘offline’ any more with smartphones in our pockets and wearables on our wrists.)
We like to think that our worldviews are based on facts, but they’re much more likely to be based on emotion. Given the increasingly-short social media-fueled news cycles, our tendency to favour images and video over text, and our willingness to share things that fit with our existing worldview, I think we’re in a lot of trouble, actually.
(I’d also point out in passing that the moral panic around teenagers and smartphones whipped up by commenters such as Jonathan Haidt says more about parents than it does about their kids)
Those equating this to events or technology are missing the point. There was a shift around 2015 where the “online” world spilled over into the real world and the way we view/treat each other changed.
After 2015 things in everyday life started to go through the political lens. We started to bucket people and behaviors along the political spectrum, which was largely an online behavior pre-2015. We started judging everyone as left or right, or we walked on eggshells to avoid it.
Before that, you knew your neighbor was Republican or Democrat based on their lawn signs, but it had little bearing on your daily interactions or behaviors. And it only seemed to matter every four years for a few months. Now it’s constant and pervasive.
And pre-2015 we had phones and social media, but there was more of a boundary, and most people would “log off” most of the day. The dopamine addiction, heightened by the polarization, was much lower. Only fringe message board and twitter posters spent their days arguing online, now it’s everywhere, and there’s no real boundary.
Source: Noahpinion
Audrey Watters discusses “the yips,” a term for “a form of dissociative freeze” which is bound up with trauma and can lead to performance anxiety and failure.
I have nowhere near the level of trauma that Audrey has had in her life, but I certainly recognise the use of exercise and competition (with others / with self) as a way of not addressing certain things. For example, I’ve had some kind of virus over the last few days which has made me feel weak. I was desperate to get back to the gym.
Even without the personal grief, trauma, and baggage we carry around as we age, the pandemic means that we have a lot of collective issues to process. Exercise seems benign because it doesn’t seem destructive like, for example, drug use. But anything can be an addictive behaviour — and, as Aristotle pointed out, eudaimonia does not sit at an extreme.
I can troubleshoot what went wrong at the gym on Wednesday. I can troubleshoot why I’m having trouble getting back to the pace and distance I was running before my “accident.” I have a whole list of physiological reasons why the barbell’s not moving, why my legs are moving. My age. My training. My knee. My glutes. My diet. My sleep.
But I’m starting to recognize – really recognize – some significant psychological reasons too. My trauma. My trauma. My trauma. Not just my fall, but all the trauma that I’ve experienced in the last few years, last few decades. I’ve funneled a lot of my hopes for “mental health” into the rhythms of exercise and movement, and it’s an incredibly fragile routine.
There are times when I know my body loves it. And there are times when my brain certainly does too. But there are other times, particularly when I get the yips (which, for the record don’t always look like failing at a deadlift; it can be something that happens all the time, like failing to lean forward as I run) that I’m starting to recognize now are bound up in fear and shame.
I don’t think any amount of “tracking” or “optimization” with gadgets is going to address this issue. For me or for others. Indeed, what if we’re just making things worse?
Source: Second Breakfast
Erin Kissane wrote a long essay about Threads and the Fediverse. It’s worth a read in its own right, but the thing that really stood out to me for some reason was a random-ish link to instructions for making an origami unicorn.
There is zero chance of me ever making this, but I’m passing it on in case you’re less bad at this kind of thing. For me, it’s not the folding that I find difficult, it’s the rotational 3D stuff. I even find it difficult putting the duvet cover on the right way round (much to my wife’s amusement/dismay).
This model was first designed in 2014, but this is an updated version with some “bug fixes” (legs are properly locked) and a color changed horn.
Source: Jo Nakashima
Daniel Dennett is a philosopher who I enjoyed reading an undergraduate studying towards a Philosophy degree. I don’t think I’ve read him since, although his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking is on my list of books I’d like to read.
Maria Popova has extracted four rules which Dennett cites in Intuition Pumps which originally come from game theorist Anatol Rapoport. Sounds like good advice to me, especially in this fractured, fragmented world.
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
Source: The Marginalian
Image: Daniel Dennett (via The New Yorker)
Ethan Marcotte takes a phrase used in passing by a friend and applies it to his own career. He makes a good point.
(I noticed that Marcotte’s logo resembles the Firefox imagery that was used while I was at Mozilla. I typed that organisation and his name into a search engine and serendipitiously discovered With Great Tech Comes Great Responsibility, which I don’t think I’ve seen before?)
As tech workers, we’re expected to constantly adapt — to be, well, endlessly clever. We’re asked to learn the latest framework, the newest design tool, the latest research methodology. Our tools keep getting updated, processes become more complex, and the simple act of just doing work seems to get redefined overnight.
And crucially, we’re not the ones who get to redefine how we work. Most recently, our industry’s relentless investment in “artificial intelligence” means that every time a new Devin or Firefly or Sora announces itself, the rest of us have to ask how we’ll adapt this time.
Dunno. Maybe it’s time we step out of that negotiation cycle, and start deciding what we want our work to look like.
Source: Ethan Marcotte
Image: Daniele Franchi
John Sutton knows more about this area than I do. Not only his he an ultramarathon runner but he works in the area of ‘carbon literacy’ and sustainability. I’m also sure that he’s correct that the claims that you need to replace your running shoes after a certain number of miles is driven by marketing departments.
Still, I’ve definitely experienced creeping lower-back pain when getting to around 650 miles in a pair of running shoes. Of course, now I’m wondering whether it’s all psychosomatic…
With age and high mileage, it is said that the midsole no longer provides the cushioning that you need to prevent injury. This is cited as the main reason that shoes need replacing on a regular basis. Again, looking at the Lightboost midsole on these shoes, I see no evidence of crushing or squashing and I certainly don’t think I can feel any difference to the foot strike than when they were new. Obviously, any change in perceived cushioning is likely to be imperceptibly gradual and I could only really confirm that the cushioning was no longer up to snuff by comparing them directly with a new pair. These shoes are at a premium price (£170) and as such, I would expect them to be made of premium materials and built to last. My visual inspection of them suggests that they are still in excellent condition.
On the face of it, I see no obvious reason why I should retire these Ultraboost Lights any time soon. However, that seems to go against industry recommendations. What if invisible midsole damage has been so gradual that I haven’t noticed it? Now that I’ve reached 500 miles, am I likely to injure myself through continued usage? As a triathlete, I know from years of bitter experience that I am far more likely to injure myself on a run than I am cycling or swimming. So, anything I can do to improve my chances of not getting injured would be a powerful incentive to act. Thus, if it could be proven scientifically that buying a new pair of trainers every 300 – 500 miles would lessen my chances of injury, then I would take that evidence very seriously indeed.
[…]
In a previous blog post I discussed the carbon footprint of a pair of running shoes (usually between 8kg and 16kg of CO2 per pair). In the great scheme of things, this is not a huge figure (until you scale up to the billions pairs of trainers sold each year and the realisation that virtually all of these are destined for landfill at end of life). My Ultraboosts have a significant content made from ocean plastic and recycled plastic which reduces their carbon footprint by 10% compared to the previous model made with non-recycled materials. 10% is better than nothing, and the use of some ocean plastic is much better than taking plastic bottles out of the recycling loop and spinning them into polyester. But, I can do a lot better than 10% by not swapping my shoes for a new pair until they are properly worn out. Simply by deciding to double the mileage and aiming for at least 1000 miles out of these shoes (hopefully more) I can at least halve the carbon footprint of my running shoe consumption.
Source: Irontwit
Dave White, Head of Digital Education and Academic Practice at the University of the Arts in London, reflects on a recent conference he attended where the tone seemed to be somewhat ‘defensive’. Instead of cheerleading for tech, the opening video and keynote instead focused on human agency.
White notes that this may be heartening but it’s a narrative that’s overly-simplistic. The creative process involves technology of all different types and descriptions. It’s not just the case that humans “get inspired” and then just use technology to achieve their ends.
The downside of these triangles is that they imply ‘development’ is a kind of ladder. You climb your way to the top where the best stuff happens. Anyone who has ever undertaken a creative process will know that it involves repeatedly moving up and down that ladder or rather, it involves iterating research, experimentation, analysis, reflection and creating (making). Every iteration is an authentic part of the process, every rung of the ladder is repeatedly required, so when I say technology allows us to spend more time at the ‘top’ of these diagrams, I’m not suggesting that we should try and avoid the rest.
I’d argue that attempting to erase the rest of the process with technology is missing the point(y). However, a positive reading would be that, as opposed the zero-sum-gain notion, a well-informed incorporation of technology could make the pointy bit a bit bigger (or more pointy). The tech could support us to explore a constantly shifting and, I hope, expanding, notion of humanness. This idea is very much in tension with the Surveillance Capitalism, Silicon Valley, reading of our times. I’m not saying that the tech does support us to explore our humanity, I’m saying it could and what is involved in that ‘could’ is worth thinking about.
Source: David White
Helen Beetham, whose work over at imperfect offerings I’ve mentioned many times here, has a guest post on the LSE Higher Education blog about AI in education.
She discusses five ways in which it’s often discussed: as a specific technology, as intelligence, as a collaborator, as a model of the world, and as the future of work. In my day-to-day routine, I tend to use it as a collaborator, because I have (what I hope to be) a reasonable mental model of the capacities and limitations of LLMs.
What’s particularly useful about this article is the meta-framing that more ‘productivity’ isn’t always to be valued. Sometimes, what we want, is for people to slow down and deliberate a bit more.
AI narratives arrive in an academic setting where productivity is already overvalued. What other values besides productivity and speed can be put forward in teaching and learning, particularly in assessment? We don’t ask students to produce assignments so that there can be more content in the world, but so we (and they) have evidence that they are developing their own mental world, in the context of disciplinary questions and practices.
Source: LSE Higher Education blog
I don’t even have words for how bad the last 14 years have been under the Tories. Thankfully, people who do have the words have written some of them down.
This piece in The New Yorker is very long, but even just reading some of it will help those outside the UK understand what is going on, and those inside it hold your head in shame.
Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum, as Johnson once called it—ever since.
[…]
These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”
[…]
“Austerity” is now a contested term. Plenty of Conservatives question whether it really happened. So it is worth being clear: between 2010 and 2019, British public spending fell from about forty-one per cent of G.D.P. to thirty-five per cent. The Office of Budget Responsibility, the equivalent of the American Congressional Budget Office, describes what came to be known as Plan A as “one of the biggest deficit reduction programmes seen in any advanced economy since World War II.” Governments across Europe pursued fiscal consolidation, but the British version was distinct for its emphasis on shrinking the state rather than raising taxes.
Like the choice of the word itself, austerity was politically calculated. Huge areas of public spending—on the N.H.S. and education—were nominally maintained. Pensions and international aid became more generous, to show that British compassion was not dead. But protecting some parts of the state meant sacrificing the rest: the courts, the prisons, police budgets, wildlife departments, rural buses, care for the elderly, youth programs, road maintenance, public health, the diplomatic corps.
In the accident theory of Brexit, leaving the E.U. has turned out to be a puncture rather than a catastrophe: a falloff in trade; a return of forgotten bureaucracy with our near neighbors; an exodus of financial jobs from London; a misalignment in the world. “There is a sort of problem for the British state, including Labour as well as all these Tory governments since 2016, which is that they are having to live a lie,” as Osborne, who voted Remain, said. “It’s a bit like tractor-production figures in the Soviet Union. You have to sort of pretend that this thing is working, and everyone in the system knows it isn’t.”
Source: The New Yorker
I always find something I agree with in posts like this. Here are some of those things in a list of “things that don’t work”:
- Tearing your hair out because people don’t follow written instructions. You can fill your instructions with BOLD CAPS and rend your garments when this too fails. A more pleasant option is to craft supportive interfaces where people don’t need instructions. I’m convinced the best interface in history is the beginning of Super Mario Brothers. You just start.
[…]
- Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is a beautiful idea, but often other people simply don’t have the same needs you do.
[…]
- Trying to figure it all out ahead of time. For hard problems, you can sit around trying to see around all corners and anticipate all possibilities. This can work—when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, everything worked the first time. But it’s really hard. If you can, it’s easier to build a prototype, learn from the flaws, and then build another one. (This, of course, contradicts the previous point.)
[…]
Things that work: Dogs, vegetables, index funds, jogging, sleep, lists, learning to cook, drinking less alcohol, surrounding yourself with people you trust and admire.
Source: Dynomight
L.M. Sacasas has written a lengthy commentary on an essay by Ted Gioia, which is well worth reading in its entirety. The main thrust of Gioia’s essay is that we have substituted ‘dopamine culture’ for the arts and creative pursuits. Sacasas believes that this is too simplistic a framing.
I’m quoting the part where he uses Pascal to show Gioia, and anyone else who holds a similar point of view, that human beings have been forever thus. Except these days we live like kings of old, where we have the means to be distracted easily and at will. I think, in general, we’re far too bothered about how other people act, and not bothered enough about how we do.
It might be helpful to back up a few hundred years and consider a different telling of our compulsive relationship to distraction, and from there to ask some better questions of our current situation. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, the French polymath Blaise Pascal wrote a series of strikingly relevant observations about distraction, or, as the translations typically put it, diversions. Frankly, these centuries-old observations do more, as I see it, to illuminate the nature of the problem we face than an appeal to dopamine and they do so because they do not reduce human behavior to neuro-chemical process, however helpful that knowledge may sometimes be.
Pascal argued, for example, that human beings will naturally seek distractions rather than confront their own thoughts in moments of solitude and quiet because those thoughts will eventually lead them to consider unpleasant matters such as their own mortality, the vanity of their endeavors, and the general frailty of the human condition. Even a king, Pascal notes, pursues distractions despite having all the earthly pleasures and honors one could aspire to in this life. “The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self,” Pascal writes. “For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself.”
We are all of us kings now surrounded by devices whose only purpose is to prevent us from thinking about ourselves.
Pascal even struck a familiar note by commenting directly on the young who do not see the vanity of the world because their lives “are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future.” “But take away their
devicesdiversions,” Pascal observes, “and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.”I don’t know, you tell me? I wouldn’t limit that description to the “young.” What do you feel when confronted with a sudden unexpected moment of silence and inactivity? Do you grow uneasy? Do you find it difficult to abide the stillness and quiet? Do your thoughts worry you? Solitude, as opposed to loneliness, can be understood as a practice or maybe even a skill. Have we been deskilled in the practice of solitude? Have we grown uncomfortable in our own company and has this amplified the preponderance of loneliness in contemporary society? Recall, for instance, how Hannah Arendt once distinguished solitude from loneliness: “I call this existential state [thinking as an internal conversation] in which I keep myself company ‘solitude’ to distinguish it from ‘loneliness,’ where I am also alone but now deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself.”
It seems to me that these are all now familiar issues and tired questions. As observations about our situation, they now strike me as banal. We all know this, right? But perhaps for that reason we do well to recall them to mind from time to time. After all, Pascal would also tell us that the stakes are high, quite high. “The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries,” he writes. “For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”
Source: The Convivial Society
I still subscribe to a few author’s publications on Substack, although I wish they’d leave the platform. One of these is Antonia Malchik’s On The Commons whose posts often include a turn of phrase which really resonates with me.
This week, I’ve been listening to Ep.24 of Hardcore History: Addendum where the host, Dan Carlin, interviews Rick Rubin, the legendary music producer. Towards the end, Rubin turns the tables and asks Carlin a few questions. One of them is about what life was like before land ownership. Carlin, who usually hugely impresses me, seemed to suggest that humans have always owned land in one way or another, and that it’s only aberrations where it was collectively owned.
I’m not sure that’s true. I think Carlin would do well to read, for example, Dave Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Private ownership of everything is something that seems to be burned into the American psyche. But it doesn’t have to be this way. As Malchik points out in her post, private ownership within a capitalist economy is essentially why we can’t have nice things.
In their book The Prehistory of Private Property, authors Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall repeatedly go back to the main difference that they see in a private property society versus one where private ownership of, say, land, much less water and food, is unknown: freedom to leave. That is, if you want to walk away from your people, or your place, can you do so and still support yourself? Can you walk away and find or make food, shelter, and clothing? In non-private property societies, the freedom to walk away and still live just fine is the norm. In private property societies, it’s almost nonexistent. You have to work to make rent. Land-rent, you might call it. Someone else owns the land, and you have to pay to live on it.
The extent to which this reality runs counter to most of our existence, even if we’re just counting the few hundred thousand years that Homo sapiens have been here and not the millions of years of hominin evolution before that, is mind-bending. There have been territories and civilizations and controlling empires for thousands of years all over the world, but for most of our species’ existence, most humans had some kind of freedom to live on, with, and from land without needing to pay someone else for the privilege of existing. Until relatively recently.
We can’t all spend our time as we would wish not just because capitalism allows a few humans to hoard an increasing amount of money and power, but because the planet’s dominant societies force land to be privately owned, and make access to food and clean water something we have to pay for.
Source: On The Commons
It’s easy to say that you hate the Tories. The reason, of course, is that while they’re in government they institute policies and pass laws that make the country more unequal. This is problematic for everyone, not just those impoverished.
This well-referenced article is published in Nature. I’d also check out this video I saw posted to LinkedIn (but originally from TikTok) about the argument about more capitalism not being better.
Even affluent people would enjoy a better quality of life if they lived in a country with a more equal distribution of wealth, similar to a Scandinavian nation. They might see improvements in their mental health and have a reduced chance of becoming victims of violence; their children might do better at school and be less likely to take dangerous drugs.
[…]
Many commentators have drawn attention to the environmental need to limit economic growth and instead prioritize sustainability and well-being. Here we argue that tackling inequality is the foremost task of that transformation. Greater equality will reduce unhealthy and excess consumption, and will increase the solidarity and cohesion that are needed to make societies more adaptable in the face of climate and other emergencies.
[…]
Other studies have also shown that more-equal societies are more cohesive, with higher levels of trust and participation in local groups16. And, compared with less-equal rich countries, another 10–20% of the populations of more-equal countries think that environmental protection should be prioritized over economic growth. More-equal societies also perform better on the Global Peace Index (which ranks states on their levels of peacefulness), and provide more foreign aid. The UN target is for countries to spend 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI) on foreign aid; Sweden and Norway each give around 1% of their GNI, whereas the United Kingdom gives 0.5% and the United States only 0.2%.
Source: Nature
I can’t stand adverts whether appearing on the web (adblockers!), TV (sound off!) or on billboards (ignore!) It feels like mind pollution to me.
I’m glad that Sheffield, a city I called home for three years while at university, has decided to do something about the most pernicious forms of advertising. It’s particularly interesting that they’ve done a cost/benefit analysis against the cost to “the NHS and other services”.
Adverts for a wide range of polluting products and brands, including airlines, airports, fossil fuel-powered cars (including hybrids) and fossil fuel companies, will not be permitted on council-owned advertising billboards under the new Sheffield City Council Advertising and Sponsorship Policy. The council’s social media, websites, publications and any sponsorship arrangements will also be subject to the restrictions.
[…]
This breaks new ground in the UK, with Sheffield going further than any other council to remove polluting promotions. Sheffield declared a climate emergency in 2019, alongside many other local councils. This step demonstrates a real commitment to reducing emissions, driving down air pollution, and encouraging a shift towards lower-carbon lifestyles.
[…]
By including specific criteria that prioritises small local businesses, the policy also aims to protect Sheffield’s local economy. After consultation with other councils and outdoor advertising companies, Sheffield’s Finance Committee concluded that the financial impact of the policy was likely to be low (approx. £14,000-£21,000) compared to the costs incurred via pressures on the NHS and other services.
Source: badvertising
This is a difficult read. Without even going into the breakdown in social relations and trust, it lays out the health and development impact of the pandemic for different age groups.
I can only thank my lucky stars that neither of our kids weren’t born in 2020. It still had an effect on them, in different ways; thankfully, that doesn’t seem to have been in terms of health or development.
The article attempts to end on a positive note, which I’ve included here. But it’s difficult to see that, unless a newly-elected Labour government manages to completely turn things around 180-degrees from the direction we’re headed under the Tories, things getting much better soon.
Across all age groups, the pandemic appears to have chipped away at health and the NHS treatment that people receive.
The challenge of reversing these trends can appear overwhelming and insurmountable, but recognising the scale of a problem can also, in time, galvanise a proportionate response.
“There are parallels with the Industrial Revolution, which was really bad for health inequalities,” said Steves. “But that was followed by a period of philanthropy, government leadership and infrastructure changes. The pandemic does have a legacy that’s important for health. So we need to also think about how this could be a major opportunity.”
Source: The Guardian
A microcast to respond to a thread on the Fediverse about uncritical acceptance of new technologies .
Transcript
Over the last 5-6 years I’ve had to think deeply about moderation in decentralised networks, first for MoodleNet and then for Bonfire. In that time, a new network has come along called Bluesky, seeded with money from Twitter (pre-Musk).
Bluesky (atpro) and Fediverse apps such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bonfire (ActivityPub) use different protocols. There’s no reason why they can’t be bridged, but attempts to do so have met with some hostility. Moderation in ActivityPub-compatible networks rely on the server/instance that you’re on. There’s advantages to this, but I guess the downside is that if you like the people but not the moderation policy, you’ve got to decide to stick or twist.
What Bluesky is doing is something similar to something Bonfire has proposed: allowing people to follow accounts that focus on moderation. This means that you can decide to, for example, dial down the profanity, or mark things as spam based on a definition you share with someone else.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing Ozone, our collaborative moderation tool. With Ozone, individuals and teams can work together to review and label content across the network. Later this week, we’re opening up the ability for you to run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app. This means that you’ll be able to create and subscribe to additional moderation services on top of what Bluesky requires, giving you unprecedented control over your social media experience.
At Bluesky, we’re investing in safety from two angles. First, we’ve built our own moderation team dedicated to providing around-the-clock coverage to uphold our community guidelines. Additionally, we recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to moderation — no single company can get online safety right for every country, culture, and community in the world. So we’ve also been building something bigger — an ecosystem of moderation and open-source safety tools that gives communities power to create their own spaces, with their own norms and preferences. Still, using Bluesky feels familiar and intuitive. It’s a straightforward app on the surface, but under the hood, we have enabled real innovation and competition in social media by building a new kind of open network.
[…]
Bluesky’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services. Starting this week, you’ll have the power to install filters from independent moderation services, layering them like building blocks on top of the Bluesky app’s foundation. This allows you to create a customized experience tailored to your preferences.
Source: Bluesky blog
Some great photos in this year’s British Wildlife Photography Awards. I was going to share the black and white one of the mountains, but this one, the overall winner, is incredibly powerful. It’s also just a fantastically-composed image.
An incredible image of a football covered in goose barnacles is the winner of this year’s British Wildlife Photography Awards.
The picture was chosen from more than 14,000 entries by both amateur and professional photographers.
The photograph, which also won the Coast and Marine category, was taken by Ryan Stalker.
“Above the water is just a football. But below the waterline is a colony of creatures. The football was washed up in Dorset after making a huge ocean journey across the Atlantic,” says Stalker.
“More rubbish in the sea could increase the risk of more creatures making it to our shores and becoming invasive species.”
Source: BBC News
This post has been going around my networks recently, so I’ve finally got around to giving it a read. The first thing that’s worth pointing out is that the author, Ed Zitron, is CEO of a tech PR firm. So it’s no surprise that it’s written in a way that’s supposed to try and pop the AI hype bubble.
I’m not unsympathetic to Zitron’s position, but when he talks about not knowing anyone using ChatGPT, I don’t think he’s telling the truth. I’m using GPT-4 every day at this point, and now supplementing it with Perplexity.ai and Claude 3. A combination of the three can be really useful for everything from speeding up idea generation to converting a bullet point list to a mindmap.
One thing I’ve found AI assistants to be incredibly powerful for is to spot things I might have missed, to provide a different perspective. Or even to put in a list of things and to generate recommendations based on that. You can do this for music playlists through to business competitors.
Every time Sam Altman speaks he almost immediately veers into the world of fan fiction, talking about both the general things that “AI” could do and non-specifically where ChatGPT might or might not fit into that without ever describing a real-world use case. And he’s done so in exactly the same way for years, failing to describe any industrial or societal need for artificial intelligence beyond a vague promise of automation and “models” that will be able to do stuff that humans can, even though OpenAI’s models continually prove themselves unable to match even the dumbest human beings alive.
Altman wants to talk about the big, sexy stories of Average General Intelligences that can take human jobs because the reality of OpenAI — and generative AI by extension — is far more boring, limited and expensive than he’d like you to know.
[…]
I believe a large part of the artificial intelligence boom is hot air, pumped through a combination of executive bullshitting and a compliant media that will gladly write stories imagining what AI can do rather than focus on what it’s actually doing. Notorious boss-advocate Chip Cutter of the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece last week about how AI is being integrated in the office, spending most of the article discussing how companies “might” use tech before digressing that every company he spoke to was using these tools experimentally and that they kept making mistakes.
[…]
Generative AI’s core problems — its hallucinations, its massive energy and unprofitable compute demands — are not close to being solved. Having now read and listened to a great deal of Murati and Altman’s interviews, I can find few cases where they’re even asked about these problems, let alone ones where they provide a cogent answer.
And I believe it’s because there isn’t one.
Source: Where’s Your Ed At?
The first microcast of 2024 and also the first on micro.blog. This one discusses the reasons for the move, and how it went.
I’ve always enjoyed Helen Beetham’s writing, and her more recent work on AI has filled a gap for me after Audrey Watters shifted gears. With this post, I’m most interested in the ending, in which Helen reflects on how much time it takes to refute the bullshit.
She links to notmy.ai which outlines why AI is a feminist issue (clue: patriarchal by design, embedded racism, precarious labour).
[W]hen I started a blog about critical approaches to technology in education, I never imagined that generative AI would fill my own horizon. It has not been entirely fun. A colleague recently described it to me as ‘the constant intellectual labour involved in having to take seriously the noise and free-floating anxiety’, and that labour feels increasingly pointless. Talking ‘AI’ down is still talking about AI, it still adds to the vortex of attention. There are other many more important things in the world to be anxious about (though ‘AI’ seems set to make all of them worse).
AI will probably give paying users a new interface on their work and play that will be fun for a while, and then invisible - part of an ever-more-immersive life online. When ROI falters there will be another story (or a newer, better, ‘smarter’ version of the AI story) to sell hyper-productivity and automation to businesses, and to keep driving capital towards the biggest platforms. I just keep thinking that the idea all this has something to do with knowledge or learning is so obviously detrimental to education, and so obviously stupid and wrong, that education will find a way of talking back. Or - because alternative stories are available - will tell these stories confidently, so I can think about something else.
Source: imperfect offerings
The UK is currently limping towards a General Election which, although it hasn’t been called yet, will probably be in October 2024. The past 14 years have absolutely decimated my country, with cuts to public services, a massive loss of trust in public officials, and spiraling inequality. The costs of Brexit cannot even be put into meaningful terms.
This article in The Guardian talks about the impact of Tory cuts to English councils, meaning that they have had to cut services. Some councils, either through bad luck, incompetence, or both, are in a really bad way. I wonder how much this will affect internal migration in the UK, as up here in Northumberland the NHS performs well, our bins are collected regularly, and the quality of life (I would say) is better.
Most of us now know the basics. In 2023, Birmingham city council – which is controlled by Labour, and is reckoned to be Europe’s largest local authority – effectively went bankrupt. There were three key reasons: massive cuts in funding from Whitehall, the cost of the belated resolution of the council’s gender pay gap, and the mind-boggling mishandling of a new IT system. In the midst of the rising need for council services – much of which was rooted in all the dislocation and disaster of the Covid crisis – all this spelled disaster. Now, many of the city’s services must be either hacked down or done away with, in pursuit of savings of about £300m over two years. As far as anyone understands it, this is the deepest programme of local cuts ever put through by a UK council.
[…]
Birmingham may be an outlier, but comparable stories are playing out all over England: in Nottingham, Somerset, Hampshire, Leicester, Bradford, Southampton and more. The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
[…]
Continuing austerity does not just kill people’s services; it has long since warped most political debates about what we should expect from the state. In lots of places, squalor, mess and festering social problems are now seen as the norm. So too is a scepticism about people’s need for help, which is endlessly encouraged by politicians and people in the media. That absurd opportunist Lee Anderson made his name by claiming that food banks were “abused” by people who didn’t need them. Now, the Times columnist Matthew Parris claims to “not believe in ADHD at all” and says that autism is “a much abused diagnosis”, while other voices insist that parents whose disabled children get some dependable help from their local councils are the possessors of “a golden ticket”. In both cases, the insidious process is much the same. First, services fail. Then, casting doubt on the resulting pain and letting the people responsible off the hook, there are loud suggestions that levels of need may not have been that great in the first place. As a result, austerity can be recast as efficiency, a move that always appeals to politicians, of whatever party.
Source: The Guardian
This is such an important reframing. I, for one, definitely have a tendency to let my latest success, failure, or injury define me. It ends up being a bit of a rollercoaster.
“I am such a loser, I can’t even do >insert attempt here< “. This creates an overblown sense of guilt (and self-pity), robbing us of any empowerment that might be had and tends to leave us moping in a corner somewhere. The ‘Big I, Small I’ visual gives us a perspective check. The Big I represents you as the shiny complex structure that is you altogether, while the Small I’s each represent one aspect of you. Every small I (for example: you trying to reach a deadline with good quality content) is one of many small I’s. It is part of you and therefore not to be trifled with but it does not define you. You are not this one thing that you are trying to achieve, you are many.
Source: Priscilla Haring
Image: DALL-E 3
The always thought-provoking Venkatesh Rao poses the question of what kind of scaling we need for AI. His analogy with building skyscrapers out of bricks-and-mortar is an interesting one. It’s a long read, but worth it.
The part which really resonated with me is when Rao starts talking about governance for AI agents, which needs to be in the form of liberal democracy rather than autocracy. “Regulating [AIs] will look like economic regulation, not technology regulation” he says.This is why you need people who can think philosophically about technology and the future of humanity.
Fascinating.
To keep AI evolving, we need the various heterodoxies to cohere into one or more alternative positive visions of how to build the technology itself, not just creative reframes that make for stimulating cocktail party conversations. Into one or more new idea of what sort of AI we should attempt to built, in an engineering rather than ethical sense of should. As in well-posed, architecturally sound, and conceptually elegant enough to handle whatever we choose to throw at it.
I’m asking the question in the same sense as one might ask, how should we attempt to build 2,500 foot skyscrapers? With brick and mortar or reinforced concrete? The answer is clearly reinforced concrete. Brick and mortar construction simply does not scale to those heights. Culture wars in architecture and urbanism around whether or not skyscrapers are a good idea for society are moot unless you have good options for actually building them.
[…]
The current idea seems to be: If we build AI datacenters that are 10x or 100x the scale of todays (as Sam Altman appears to want to), and train GPT-style models on them that are also correspondingly scaled up, we’ll get to the most interesting sorts of AI. This is like trying to build the Burj Khalifa out of brick-and-mortar. It’s a fundamentally unsound idea. Problems of data movement and memory management at scale that are already cripplingly hard will become insurmountable. Just as the very idea of a 2,500 foot high brick structure is unsound because bricks don’t have the right structural properties, the current “bricks” of modern AI (to a first approximation, the “naked” Large X Models thinly wrapped in application logic) are the wrong ones.
[…]
[Going] back to the analogy to reinforced concrete. [The AIs Rao is arguing for] are fundamentally built out of composite materials that combine the constituent simple materials in very deliberate ways to achieve particular properties. Reinforced concrete achieves this by combining rebar and cement in particular geometries. The result is a flexible language of differentiated forms (not just cuboidal beams) with a defined grammar.
[They] will achieve this by combining embodiment, boundary management, temporality, and personhood elements in very deliberate ways, to create a similar language of differentiated forms that interact with a defined grammar.
Source: Ribbonfarm
I set myself the target of running 1,000km this year. Camille Herron just ran 900km in six days 🤯
When the FURTHER event started last Wednesday, Herron was already the holder of multiple world records from 50 to 250 miles. A small crowd gathered under four towers of stage lights and rows of orange and white tents. The 42-year-old was in shades, a water bottle stuffed in the crotch of her shorts. On day one, she chugged a Coke float and ran 133 miles. Day two, she downed tacos and added another 113 miles. On 8 March International Women’s Day, she broke the American 48-hour road record for women. More would follow.
Each time Herron broke a record, she held her arms out wide, her hands pointing to the sky as if to say, “isn’t this incredible?” The fact that she is openly awed by what she does has at times made her a target in the ultrarunning community. Her whimsical pre-race mantra of “letting the magic come out” only adds to that. But it’s hard to argue with the numbers. And the numbers and records were piling up: a new 300km mark, the American 48-hour road record, a new 300-mile road record, the women’s 500km world record, the women’s 500 mile. When she completed the latter, she danced around the start line in pink compression socks, celebrating with high fives and hugs.
[…]
But Herron isn’t done. As the sun rises over the Santa Rosa Mountains, she lifts herself to her feet once more. One more push. One more loop, then two, three. She reaches 900km, another record, then it’s over. In her wake are 11 world records recognized by GOMU and a world best performance by the IAU. Either way, the numbers on the LED screen read a clear 560.3 miles. Above is one word in all caps: FURTHER.
Source: The Guardian
Sometimes, I come across a post which comes from leftfield and is almost impossible to quote in a meaningful way. This one revolves around three things I’ve never even heard of, let alone experienced. The author puts them under the heading ‘consciousness porn’, with the three examples being quite diverse.
What I find so fascinating is that there are layers upon layers to this. For example, one of the commenters points out that the guy shooting the long videos of walks around Tokyo posted to his YouTube channel that he was depressed, wasn’t going to do any more after uploading the ones he’d already recorded, and didn’t know why anyone watched them in the first place.
It took me a while to comprehend why my son would watch other people play videogames. After a while I began to understand that there was an element of learning how to improve his own gameplay, but there was also an aesthetic to it. This consciousness porn seems to be almost pure aesthetic. I guess the next stage is endless versions of this created using AI.
Rambalac does everything he can to avoid intruding on the world he is observing, to be, like the character in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin, “a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” But occasionally we catch a glimpse of his reflection in a store window or elevator mirror – oh, he’s not Japanese! And in every frame we feel his presence – quiet, sweet, and a little sad, stopping to watch a black cat thread its way across a cluttered stoop, showing us the label of the green tea he’s bought from a vending machine, looking away politely from a fellow pedestrian, or standing still, on a rainy night, before the red gate that marks the entrance to a Shinto shrine, entranced.
[…]
I often listen to dub techno while watching Rambalac videos, which amplifies their chill, phenomenological trippiness, and makes me feel like I’m experiencing a mutant artform invented by William Gibson. An artform I call consciousness porn.
Source: Donkeyspace
Image: DALL-E 3
People call me prolific, but I’m nothing compared to Cory Doctorow. I can’t keep up with his mostly-daily newsletters, never mind his longer-form stuff.
In this piece, he talks about one of his favourite topics: vendor lock-in. However, the genius lies in the way that he explains, in a way that sounds so obvious that it feels like scales falling from your eyes, why people blame immigrants for the lack of jobs. The real, historical reason for the decline in good jobs is because employers (with government help) smashed the unions.
Moving onto AI, he points out the “monstrous proposition” of AI companies who suggest that their clients train models based on workers, then fire the workers, replacing them with the AI products. The latter are nowhere near good enough to actually do the workers' jobs, but all the AI companies need to do is sell the proposition.
That’s why there’s no jobs around at the moment: an illusion based on VC money. Remember how Uber was going to mean self-driving cars and the end of public transport? Remember how cryptocurrencies were going to mean the end of banks? Here we go again.
Bruce Schneier coined the term “feudal security” to describe Big Tech’s offer: “move into my fortress – lock yourself into my technology – and I will keep you safe from all the marauders roaming the land”
It’s a tried-and-true bullying tactic: convince your victim that only you can keep them safe so they surrender their agency to you, so the victim comes under your power and can’t escape your cruelty and exploitation. The focus on external threats is key: so long as the victim is more afraid of the dangers beyond the bully’s cage than they are of the bully, they can be lured deeper and deeper until the cage-door slams shut.
But here’s the thing about trusting a warlord when he tells you that the fortress’s walls are there to keep the bad guys out: those walls also keep you in. Sure, Apple will use its control over Ios to stop Facebook from spying on you, but when Apple spies on you, no one can help you, because Apple exercises total control over all Ios programs, including any that would stop Apple from nonconsensually harvesting your data and selling access to it:
Source: Pluralistic
I’ve already posted a thread about this on the Fediverse, so I’ll just copy-and-paste then tweak from that rant. TL;DR: Adobe have published a (commissioned) report about digital credentials, everyone’s over-excited, and I want to sound a note of caution.
About 15 years ago, it was clear that Higher Education was about to become significantly ‘unbundled’ in western countries. The trend had started even before the start of my career, but accelerated around that time. We had things like Pearson being given degree-awarding powers, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) allowing anyone to join university-provided courses, and the first blushes of digital credentials.
As thinkers such as Audrey Watters pointed out, unbundling is all well and good, but you better be damned careful about who’s doing the ‘rebundling’ and for what purpose. So, of course, the MOOC providers turned into non-profit and for-profit providers that met with various success (edX, Udacity, FutureLearn, etc.) These all needed ways to ‘certify’ their courses. Some partnered with universities, others went alone with their own credentialing.
The digital credentials space has always been a difficult one to keep track of. That’s because it’s decentralised by design, just like the Fediverse, and… email. So while there are absolutely standards that make the whole thing work (Open Badges, etc.) it’s always been difficult to talk about numbers and how people are using digital credentials. In true “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed” style, some sectors have seen explosive adoption of digital credentials.
IBM, for example, have issued millions of digital credentials for things that you wouldn’t necessarily go to university to learn. It’s a big deal, and leads to decently-paying (and often high-paying) jobs. That’s great, and I point to this a lot. But it’s not like IBM did it out the goodness of their hearts. They’re looking to remove the degree requirement for their jobs, which of course has a long-term depressing effect on wages.
Coming back to Adobe, while it’s great that they’ve suddenly discovered digital credentials and have commissioned A Report To Tell Us How Great They Are, we’d be naive to think that this is a benevolent act. What they’re doing, it seems, is positioning the ‘Adobe Certified Professional’ digital credential as the one that you need in that particular industry. That means tying ‘creativity’ to using certain tools, and having a very privatised ‘rebundling’ of knowledge and skills.
So, be careful what you wish for, I guess. Could a lot of this have been foreseen over a decade ago? Absolutely. But the problem, as many on the Fediverse will recognise, is that there’s a vested interest in not recognising the diversity of human experience. Digital credentials could and should be used to recognise lifelong and lifewide learning. They can be used to showcase the breadth of our experience in a holistic way.
That’s not what brands are interested in, though. Brands are interested in capturing and enclosing you as data points to be packaged up and sold alongside their proprietary products.
I’m sure there are plenty of people in my network (especially on LinkedIn) which will see this as an over-reaction. “But Doug, isn’t bringing more attention to the space worthwhile?” Not if the lens that is used to understand the space is reductionist and perpetuates some of the very problems we’re trying to solve.
Gone are the days of a college degree being the only key to unlock meaningful careers. Employers today need job candidates and employees with new, in-demand skills, and they expect to see them demonstrated in a variety of ways beyond a college transcript. With the rise of remote work, digital transformation, and AI, today’s most in-demand skills — creative problem-solving, visual communication, and digital fluency — are especially hard for hiring managers to identify in job application materials.
To shed light on this evolving landscape, Adobe has just released a research white paper, “The Creative Edge: How Digital Credentials Unlock Emerging Skills in the Age of AI.” Conducted by Edelman, the results of this commissioned global research study outline the role digital credentials play in helping career seekers get hired by showcasing their digital and creative skills.
Source: How digital credentials unlock emerging skills in the age of AI
Image: DALL-E 3
It’s weird to think that I was about my son’s age (17) when I started getting migraines. It wasn’t a massive surprise: there were migraineurs on both sides of my family, including my mother and my paternal grandmother. I may have literally dodged a bullet: being susceptible to migraines disqualifies you from pretty much every role in the Royal Air Force, to which I was in the process of applying.
These days, partly through stress management, ensuring I get good sleep, avoiding dehyrdration, and taking some supplements I’ve found helpful, my migraines are both less frequent and less extreme. They’re still part of who am, though, and I know to get off screens immediately and take some of my meds if my vision starts getting distorted.
How to describe a scintillating scotoma? It’s one of the most common symptoms of a migraine, but unless you’ve had one, it sounds unreal. A scintillating scotoma is like a barbed ripple in the pool of sight. It’s a skeletal Magic Eye raised up from the flatness of the world. It’s a glare on the tarmac as you drive West at sunset on a rain-slick freeway—only when you turn your head, it’s still there, so you have to pull over, close your eyes, and wait out the slow-motion firework working its way across your brain.
[…]
In the absence of an organizing mind, everything comes unglued. Faces go missing and dark holes seem to eat half the universe. Migraine sufferers can experience the uncanny sense of consciousness doubling known as déja-vu, or its cousin, jamais-vu, in which the world feels newly-made. The world might feel suddenly very unreal, fracture into a mosaic, or slow to a stop-motion pace, dropping frames. The self might cleave in two in a fit of somatopsychic duality. Writing about these bizarre and horrifying perceptual phenomena, the late Oliver Sacks observed that migraines “show us how the brain-mind constructs ‘space’ and ‘time,’ by demonstrating what happens when space and time are broken, or unmade.”
[…]
According to Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience From Within, migraine auras are as old as humankind—so old, perhaps, that they may have inspired the geometric forms of Stone Age cave drawings. Which makes recent attempts to generate migraine auras using convolutional neural networks seem particularly poignant to me: what began in stone, animated by the hot flicker of firelight, continues 5,000 years later, deep in the heart of servers whose mineral components were mined from the same dark Earth.
Source: Wild Information
Image: Manuscript illumination by Hildegard of Bingen, 1511 (who was a migraineur)
This post by Tim Klapdor is definitely related the Aeon article I quoted about carving out time for reflection.
People are surprised when I say that I do about 20-25 hours of paid work per week. Somehow that’s ‘part time’. But I live a full life: studying, writing, taking my kids here, there, and everywhere. The only thing missing? I’d like to travel more, professionally.
A career contains a multitude of jobs. Some of them are the ones you get paid for, but many of them aren’t. And that’s often where the confusion comes into play. The paid job begins to bleed into other areas, and you associate the paid job with all the other jobs. They get lumped together as a career, but they are distinct and need to be kept separate. It’s our mind that blends them together, so every so often, we need to pull focus, reevaluate and paint in the edges to make it clear what our jobs really are.
[…]
In reflection, I can say that for the last few years, I’ve paid too much attention to my paid job and not my career. I’ve allowed the job to expand beyond its parameters and edges to consume everything around it—my time, attention, and priorities. What I need to do, and what I plan to do in 2024, is to switch that.
I want to focus on my career, not my job.
Source: Tim Klapdor
I hadn’t thought of the early days of the pandemic as being akin to a general labour strike. Interesting. I could quote the entirety of this article, but I’ll just mention one thing that I haven’t included below: “It is because of its emptiness that the room is useful.” (Lao Tzu). The author of this article, David J Siegel, uses this to make the point that I’ve used as the title for this post; that absence is not defection.
The early period of the pandemic (which approximated in many respects a kind of general labour strike) gave some of us an intimation of what life lived largely off the clock can be like when much of what passes for work is suspended or slowed and we are afforded precious ‘little gaps of solitude and silence’, as the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called them, to engage in worthy pursuits that elude us under normal circumstances. We found incomparable personal freedoms and new opportunities for enrichment and fulfilment in the cessation of many of our standard operating procedures.
Then, as everyone recalls, we were summoned back to the office. But, once we had experienced this new way of being, the prospect of returning to the old order – submitting to the control, policing and surveillance of our former workaday lives – became almost unthinkable, especially for members of a chronically insecure workforce forced to endure low pay, lack of opportunity for advancement, inflexible schedules, and a multitude of everyday insults and indignities. Perhaps the chief insult to us all is the governing assumption that we must be collocated – or collated – to do our best work, despite having demonstrated our capacity for self-directed productivity from home (or other private quarters) under the most trying circumstances.
[…]
In The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (2009), Byung-Chul Han suggests that our experience of intervals is being ‘destroyed in order to produce total proximity and simultaneity’. When everything (and everyone) is within reach at all times, we lose a sense of what it means to be in – and even to savour – transitional states of in-betweenness. As an antidote, [some authors] recommend that we ‘tarry with time’ and ‘make spaces for the play of purposeless action’.
We can, in other words, reappropriate some of the time and space being withdrawn from us. These can be reclaimed in the fugitive moments we thieve from the calendar, or they can be recovered in what the anarchist Hakim Bey in 1985 called ‘temporary autonomous zones’: undetectable underground enclaves that we carve out of the landscape of our everyday lives in order to find or free ourselves. Simultaneously, practices of disengagement might withdraw from organisations (workplaces primary among them) their extraordinary power to mediate – to dictate and direct – far too many aspects of our existence and experience. Opting to bypass certain workplace amenities and conveniences expertly designed to keep us at work – the cafeteria, the fitness centre, the dry cleaner, the onsite health clinic – might not seem like much of a tactic of rebellion, but it does its part to lessen our dependence on our employer as lifehack, helpmate or healer.
[…]
Withdrawal has an almost universally negative connotation in public life, where it is treated as the ultimate transgression and disdained as retreat or defeat – the very opposite of engagement. However, to withdraw is also, crucially, to repair – both to go to a place and to mend. From this perspective, withdrawal is not merely a defeatist tack; rather, it is, or can be, direct action for a restoration of intellectual life – the kind that is free to ask (to fully engage with) impertinent questions – in settings that have practically banished it, made it inaccessible, or are attempting to monitor and monetise it according to terms not of our choosing.
[…]
Among the questions some of us are investigating in our contemplative moments of disengagement, withdrawal, removal, retreat or escape – however we choose to designate those instances when we take our leave – are these: when, or to what extent, do our norms of organisational affiliation and attachment make us sick or otherwise compound the very problems such forms of connection are meant to solve? In what ways might our occasional absences improve our solitary and even our solidary experiences of work and of life more generally?
Source: Aeon
Anthropic, the organisation set up by ex-OpenAI staffers, has recently released Claude 3. This is apparently even more powerful than GPT-4, although I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.
Alongside the release, Anthropic has also shared a Prompt Library which, I guess, is the equivalent of OpenAI’s GPTs.
Source: Anthropic Prompt Library
The only times I’ve ever betted on sports is with my father. Back when I lived at home, we’d all choose a horse in the Grand National (out of a hat) and I’d go down with him to the bookies to put the bets on. And then, when we went to a football match at Sunderland, we’d decide what bet to put on, too.
I’ve never betted on sports by myself. It’s a slippery slope, as I know what I’m like. When I was my son’s age (17) I was mildly addicted to scratchcards for a few weeks, but quit when I won enough to break even. That’s why the whole world of sports betting, which I know must be huge given that almost every Premier League football team is sponsored by a related company, is a black box to me.
Drew Austin talks about sports betting not only being the further atomisation of an activity which was at least nominally social, but also the way that it reduces a complex bundle of qualitative emotions down to a set of flat, quantitative, numbers.
As the Facebook/Google/Twitter clearnet dissolves and the internet becomes a dark forest, another relatively recent tech category offers a lens for anticipating the future of shared experience and solipsism: sports betting apps. Although largely unleashed by regulatory changes rather than technical innovation, the rise of mainstream, app-enabled sports gambling has reframed a still-powerful bulwark of mass culture as a solitary pursuit. As televised sports continue fragmenting into digital content just like everything else, sports betting creates a derivative market on top of that content, which in turn yields its own additional bounty of content. If you’ve ever bet on a game and then watched it with other people, you probably realized quickly that nobody cares about your betting angle(s) and that you have to shut up about it. You’re on your own. But if you show up at the Super Bowl party wearing a Kansas City Chiefs jersey, you are a legible entity, and everyone has something to talk to you about. To bet on sports is to share the same space (literal or figurative) with a multitude of people who have their own specific angle and only the meta-game in common. Sports gambling is even more fascinating, however, in the way it alters your brain as a spectator of the game: You exchange a complex bundle of emotional and aesthetic nuance for a purely quantitative perspective, which highlights everything that benefits you and pushes the rest to the background. It’s how it would feel to be a computer watching sports. A lot of things we do on the internet feel like that. Who needs NPCs to interact with when we all act like them anyway? We pay so much attention to how computers are learning to be human, but forget we’re also learning to act like them.
Source: Kneeling Bus
Image: DALL-E 3
Andrew Curry reflects on the work of Jon Alexander, author of a book called Citizens (2022). Alexander has been on a bit of a journey talking to people, and has made some discoveries.
I’m mainly sharing this for the diagram, which Stowe Boyd also picked up on, and provides a better commentary than I ever could. All I’ll say is that it’s good to see things laid out so clearly, although I would have put the ‘Subject’ column to the right (where it is politically) and made it an easier-to read colour!
[H]eaven knows we have a lot of Sensible Grown-Up Politicians around the place. Albanese in Australia, Starmer in the UK. But: because they have not yet realised, or acknowledged, that our political systems are failing, they don’t have the tools to deal with authoritarianism.
But it’s not just down to them. We can’t sit down in Restaurant Hope and wait for the menu. We need to be in the kitchen. […]
Authoritarians offer to replace this with a story about being a subject: if we put them in power, they will fix things for us (although they don’t, of course).
[…]
We need to believe in people if we, the people, are to have any hope for ourselves and for humanity.
Source: Just Two Things
After giving a potted history of the internet and all of the ways it has failed to live up to its promise, Paris Marx suggests that we need to start over with the entire tech industry. It’s hard to disagree.
My internet habits are vastly different to what they were a decade ago. Back then, I was seven years into using Twitter, had a great following and ‘personal learning network’. The world, pre-Brexit and Trump had the seeds of the turmoil to come, but Big Tech was nowhere near as brazen as it is post-pandemic, and coked-up on AI fever dreams.
There can only be only conclusion from all of this: the digital revolution has failed. The initial promise was a deception to lay the foundation for another corporate value-creation scheme, but the benefits that emerged from it have been so deeply eroded by commercial imperatives that the drawbacks far outweigh the remaining redeeming qualities — and that only gets worse with every day generative AI tools are allowed to keep flooding the web with synthetic material.
The time for tinkering around the edges has passed, and like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the only hope to be found today is in seeking to tear down the edifice the tech industry has erected and to build new foundations for a different kind of internet that isn’t poisoned by the requirement to produce obscene and ever-increasing profits to fill the overflowing coffers of a narrow segment of the population.
There were many networks before the internet, and there can be new networks that follow it. We don’t have to be locked into the digital dystopia Silicon Valley has created in a network where there was once so much hope for something else entirely. The ongoing erosion already seems to be sending people fleeing by ditching smartphones (or at least trying to reduce how much they use them), pulling back from the mess that social media has become, and ditching the algorithmic soup of streaming services.
Personal rejection is a welcome development, but as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within. We also can’t fall for any attempt to cast a libertarian “declaration of independence” as a truly liberatory future for everyone.
Source: Disconnect
Image: DALL-E 3
I’ve curated my comfy middle-class life to such a degree that I mostly hear about the dark underbelly of the web / toxic online behaviour through publications such as Ryan Broderick’s excellent Garbage Day.
In his latest missive, Broderick gives the example of a comedian I’ve never encountered before by the name of Shane Gillis. Go and read the whole thing for the bigger context, but the main point Broderick is making I’ve bolded below. I would point out that the Fediverse is, in my experience, on the whole well-moderated. At least, better moderated than centralised social networks such as X and Instagram.
Last year, Gillis was a guest on the unwatchable “comedy “podcast” Flagrant and had to tell the hosts to stop pulling up and laughing at videos of people with Down Syndrome dancing. Clips from the episode recently started making the rounds again this week on Reddit and X. It’s incredibly uncomfortable to watch.
And, sure, Gillis is not directly organizing any of this larger edgelord behavior. But he can’t be separated from it either. As I wrote above, the companies that run the internet have all but given up moderating it, so that work has to be done by us now. We have to manage our own communities and we have to look out for the most vulnerable. People with Down Syndrome and their loved ones should be able to openly share their lives online without worrying about getting turned into a meme or converted into engagement bait by some anonymous goblin. Even if that means dropping your chill bro facade and riling up the Stoolies when you tell people to stop.
Gills has the biggest podcast on Patreon. He’s been at the top of their charts for over a year. He has a massive platform and he built it by letting every awful guy in the country project themselves on to him. And while he does genuinely seem to really want to use that fame to bring visibility to the Down Syndrome community — and I think it’s admirable that he does — he’s not willing to draw a clear line between visibility and exploitation.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: DALL-E 3
Trigger warnings: death, persecution, suicide
Over on my personal blog I wrote that, given the depth of the climate emergency,‘hope’ is the wrong thing to be focusing upon. Will Richardson left a comment which pointed me towards this article by Samantha Rose Hill, a biographer of Hannah Arendt, for Aeon.
Arendt was a German-American historian and philosopher who escaped the Nazis. This article is about Arendt’s rejection in her work of the concept of ‘hope’ as being a lot less useful than action. Before getting to Arendt’s thoughts, I just want to share this quotation that is included in the article from Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish poet who wrote about the ways in which hope was used to destroy Jewish humanity. Borowski wrote the following lines while reflecting on his imprisonment in Auschwitz. He killed himself soon afterwards:
Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.
Arendt suggests that hope is part of a desire for a happy ending, not based on the facts around us, but rather wishful thinking:
Many discussions of hope veer toward the saccharine, and speak to a desire for catharsis. Even the most jaded observers of world affairs can find it difficult not to catch their breath at the moment of suspense, hoping for good to triumph over evil and deliver a happy ending. For some, discussions of hope are attached to notions of a radical political vision for the future, while for others hope is a political slogan used to motivate the masses. Some people uphold hope as a form of liberal faith in progress, while for others still hope expresses faith in God and life after death.
Arendt breaks with these narratives. Throughout much of her work, she argues that hope is a dangerous barrier to acting courageously in dark times. She rejects notions of progress, she is despairing of representative democracy, and she is not confident that freedom can be saved in the modern world. She does not even believe in the soul, as she writes in one love letter to her husband. The political theorist George Kateb once remarked that her work is ‘offensive to a democratic soul’. When she was awarded an honorary degree at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1966, the president said: ‘Your writings challenge the mind, disturb the conscience, and depress the spirit of your readers; yet out of your wisdom and firm belief in mankind’s inner strength comes a sure hope.’
I’ve been listening to Ep.28 (‘Superhumanly Inhuman’) of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: Addendum which is about the Holocaust. It’s absolutely awful listening, but important stuff to know about. The article continues by talking about this dark period for Jewish and world history:
It was holding on to hope, Arendt argued, that rendered so many helpless. It was hope that destroyed humanity by turning people away from the world in front of them. It was hope that prevented people from acting courageously in dark times.
Caught between fear and ‘feverish hope’, the inmates in the ghetto were paralysed. The truth of ‘resettlement’ and the world’s silence led to a kind of fatalism. Only when they gave up hope and let go of fear, Arendt argues, did they realise that ‘armed resistance was the only moral and political way out’.
Instead, Arendt coined a new term: natality which celebrates the miracle of birth and continued human existence:
An uncommon word, and certainly more feminine and clunkier-sounding than hope, natality possesses the ability to save humanity. Whereas hope is a passive desire for some future outcome, the faculty of action is ontologically rooted in the fact of natality. Breaking with the tradition of Western political thought, which centred death and mortality from Plato’s Republic through to Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Arendt turns towards new beginnings, not to make any metaphysical argument about the nature of being, but in order to save the principle of humanity itself. Natality is the condition for continued human existence, it is the miracle of birth, it is the new beginning inherent in each birth that makes action possible, it is spontaneous and it is unpredictable. Natality means we always have the ability to break with the current situation and begin something new. But what that is cannot be said.
Hill, the author of the Aeon article, argues that:
Conceptually, natality can be understood as the flipside of hope:
- Hope is dehumanising because it turns people away from this world.
- Hope is a desire for some predetermined future outcome.
- Hope takes us out of the present moment.
- Hope is passive.
- Hope exists alongside evil.
- Natality is the principle of humanity.
- Natality is the promise of new beginnings.
- Natality is present in the Now.
- Natality is the root of action.
- Natality is the miracle of birth.
What I love about this approach is that, as the article says, it’s kind of a “secular article of faith,” placing the responsibility for action firmly in our hands. Hope is, to some degree, the wish to be told soothing stories by a authoritative figure. It’s time for us to grow up.
Source: Aeon
Image: DALL-E 3
If someone asks me “what kind of future would you like to live in?” I’m going to just point them to this. It’s the work of Pascal Wicht, a systems thinker and strategic designer who specialises in tackling complex and ill-defined problems.
The dangers and problems with generative AI are many and well-documented. What I love about it is that all of a sudden we can quickly create things that we point to for inspiration and alternative futures. In this case, Wicht is experimenting with the Midjourney v6 Alpha, and there are many more images here.
Future Visualisations for Preferable Futures, using the MidJourney’s Generative Adversarial Networks.
I am in my third week of long Covid again. I can spend one or two hours per day on AI images and doing some writing. These images are part of what kept me motivated while mostly stuck in bed.
In this ongoing series, I continue to use the power of AI to explore a compelling question: What does a future look like where we successfully slow down and avert the looming abominations of collapse and extinction?
Source: Whispers & Giants
Image CC BY-NC Pascal Wicht
What an absolutely fantastic read this is. I’d encourage everyone to read it in its entirety, especially if you’re a parent. The list of things that the author, Molly Brodak, suggests we try out is:
I find #5 difficult, have gotten better at #4, and think that #3 is really, super important. I used to hate being talked to ‘differently’ as a child (compared to adults), and have noticed how much kids appreciated being talked to without being patronised.
I’m a child of a therapist. What that means is that I was expertly listened-to most of my life. And then, wow, I met the rest of the world.
It’s a good thing for our survival. It’s what makes this whole civilization thing possible, these linked minds. So why are so many people still so bad at listening?
One reason is this myth: that the good listener just listens. This egregious misunderstanding actually leads to a lot of bad listening, and I’ll tell you why: because a good listener is actually someone who is good at talking.
Source: Tomb Log
Image: DALL-E 3
I don’t often visit Medium other than when I’m writing a post for the WAO blog. When I’m there, it’s unlikely that any of the ‘recommended’ articles grab my attention. But this one did.
Although it seems ‘odd’, when you come to think of it, the notion of businesses selling to machines as well as humans makes complete sense. It won’t be long until, for better or worse, many of us will have AI agents who act on our behalf. That will not only be helping us with routine tasks and giving advice, but also making purchases on our behalf.
Obviously, the entity behind this blog post, “next-generation professional services company” has an interest in this becoming a reality. But it seems plausible.
Below is a timeline that encapsulates this progression, providing a roadmap for navigating the impending shifts in the landscape of consumer behavior:
Bound customer (today): Here, humans set the rules, and machines follow, executing purchases for specific items. This is seen in today’s smart devices and services like automated printer ink subscriptions.
Adaptable customer (by 2026): Machines will co-lead with humans, making optimized decisions from a set of choices. This will be reflected in smart home systems that can choose energy providers.
Autonomous customer (by 2036): The machine will take the lead, inferring needs and making purchases based on a complex understanding of rules, content, and preferences, such as AI personal assistants managing daily tasks.
Source: Slalom Business
Image: DALL-E 3
I’m not sure of the backstory to this drawing (‘Ultravioleta’) by Jon Juarez, but I don’t really care. It looks great, and so I’ve bought a print of it from their shop. They seem, from what I can tell, to have initially withdrawn from social media after companies such as OpenAI and Midjourney started using artists' work for their training data, but are now coming back.
Fediverse: @harriorrihar@mas.to
Shop: Lama
This is a great post by Jennifer Moore, whose main point is about using AI for software development, but along the way provide three paragraphs which get to the nub of why tools such as ChatGPT seem somewhat magical.
As Moore points out, large language models aren’t aware. They model things based on statistical probability. To my mind, it’s not so different than when my daughter was doing phonics and learning to recognise the construction of words and the probability of how words new to her would be spelled.
ChatGPT and the like are powered by large language models. Linguistics is certainly an interesting field, and we can learn a lot about ourselves and each other by studying it. But language itself is probably less than you think it is. Language is not comprehension, for example. It’s not feeling, or intent, or awareness. It’s just a system for communication. Our common lived experiences give us lots of examples that anything which can respond to and produce common language in a sensible-enough way must be intelligent. But that’s because only other people have ever been able to do that before. It’s actually an incredible leap to assume, based on nothing else, that a machine which does the same thing is also intelligent. It’s much more reasonable to question whether the link we assume exists between language and intelligence actually exists. Certainly, we should wonder if the two are as tightly coupled as we thought.
That coupling seems even more improbable when you consider what a language model does, and—more importantly—doesn’t consist of. A language model is a statistical model of probability relationships between linguistic tokens. It’s not quite this simple, but those tokens can be thought of as words. They might also be multi-word constructs, like names or idioms. You might find “raining cats and dogs” in a large language model, for instance. But you also might not. The model might reproduce that idiom based on probability factors instead. The relationships between these tokens span a large number of parameters. In fact, that’s much of what’s being referenced when we call a model large. Those parameters represent grammar rules, stylistic patterns, and literally millions of other things.
What those parameters don’t represent is anything like knowledge or understanding. That’s just not what LLMs do. The model doesn’t know what those tokens mean. I want to say it only knows how they’re used, but even that is over stating the case, because it doesn’t know things. It models how those tokens are used. When the model works on a token like “Jennifer”, there are parameters and classifications that capture what we would recognize as things like the fact that it’s a name, it has a degree of formality, it’s feminine coded, it’s common, and so on. But the model doesn’t know, or understand, or comprehend anything about that data any more than a spreadsheet containing the same information would understand it.
Source: Jennifer++
Image: gapingvoid
The endgame of news, as far as Big Tech is concerned is, I guess, just-in-time created content for ‘users’ (specified in terms of ad categories) who then react in particular ways. That could be purchasing a thing, but it also could be outrage, meaning more time on site, more engagement, and more shareholder value.
Like Ryan Broderick, I have some faith that humans will get sick of AI-generated content, just as they got sick of videos and list posts. But I also have this niggling doubt: the tendency is to see AI only through the lens of tools such as ChatGPT. That’s not what the AI of the future is likely to resemble, at all.
Adweek broke a story this week that Google will begin paying publications to use an unreleased generative-AI tool to produce content. The details are scarce, but it seems like Google is largely approaching small publishers and paying them an annual “five-figure sum”. Good lord, that’s low.
Adweek also notes that the publishers don’t have to publicly acknowledge they’re using AI-generated copy and the, presumably, larger news organizations the AI is scraping from won’t be notified. As tech critic Brian Merchant succinctly put it, “The nightmare begins — Google is incentivizing the production of AI-generated slop.”
Google told Engadget that the program is not meant to “replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating, and fact-checking their articles,” but it’s also impossible to imagine how it won’t, at the very least, create a layer of garbage above or below human-produced information surfaced by Google. Engadget also, astutely, compared it to Facebook pushing publishers towards live video in the mid-2010s.
[…]
Companies like Google or OpenAI don’t have to even offer any traffic to entice publishers to start using generative-AI. They can offer them glorified gift cards and the promise of an executive’s dream newsroom: one without any journalists in it. But the AI news wire concept won’t really work because nothing ever works. For very long, at least. The only thing harder to please than journalists are readers. And I have endless faith in an online audience’s ability to lose interest. They got sick of lists, they got sick of Facebook-powered human interest social news stories, they got sick of tweet roundups, and, soon, they will get sick of “news” entirely once AI finally strips it of all its novelty and personality. And when the next pivot happens — and it will — I, for one, am betting humans figure out how to adapt faster than machines.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: DALL-E 3
Jay Springett shares some media consumption figures. It blows my mind how much time people spend consuming media rather than making stuff.
I was hanging out with a friend the other week and we were talking about our ‘little hobbies’ as we called them. All the things that we’re interested in. Our niches that we nerd out about which aren’t the sort of thing that we can talk to people about at any great length.
We got to wondering about how we spend our time, and what other people spend their time doing. We had big conversation with our other friends at the table with us about what they do with there time. Their answers wen’t all that far away from these stats I’ve just Googled:
Did you know in the UK in January 2024, adults watched an average of 2 hours 31 minutes a day of linear TV?
Meanwhile, a Pinterest user spends about 14 minutes on the platform daily, BUT “83% of weekly Pinterest users report making a purchase based on content they encountered”
The average podcast listener spends an hour a day listening to podcast.
Using a different metric, an average audiobook enjoyer spends an average of 2 hours 19 minutes every day,
In Q3 of 2023 the average amount of time spent on social media a day was 2 hours and 23 minutes? 1 in 3 internet minutes spent online can be attributed to social media platforms.
I like this combined more holistic statistic.
According to a study on media consumption in the United Kingdom, the average time spent consuming traditional media is consistently decreasing while people spend more time using digital media. In 2023, it is estimated that people in the United Kingdom will spend four hours and one minute using traditional media, while the average daily time spent with digital media is predicted to reach six hours and nine minutes.
Source: thejaymo
Image: DALL-E 3
I love this piece in Aeon from Abigail Tulenko, who argues that folklore and philosophy share a common purpose in challenging us to think deeply about life’s big questions. Her essay is essentially a critique of academic philosophy’s exclusivity and she calls for a broader, more inclusive approach that embraces… folklore.
Tulenko suggests that folktales, with all of their richness and diversity, offer fresh perspectives and can invigorate philosophical discussions by incorporating a wider range of experiences and ideas. By integrating folklore into philosophical inquiry, she suggests that there is the potential to democratise the field and make it not only more accessible and engaging, but help to break down academic barriers and interdisciplinary collaboration.
I’m all for it. Although it’s problematic to talk about Russian novels and culture at the moment, there are some tales from that country which are deeply philosophical in nature. I’d also include things like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as a story from which philosophers can glean insights.
The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terrified and tantalised me as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the devil with string in order to discover important truths. These days, as a PhD student in philosophy, I sometimes worry I’ve done the same. I still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable demons.
[…]
propose that one avenue forward is to travel backward into childhood – to stories like Ibronka’s. Folklore is an overlooked repository of philosophical thinking from voices outside the traditional canon. As such, it provides a model for new approaches that are directly responsive to the problems facing academic philosophy today. If, like Ibronka, we find ourselves tied to the devil, one way to disentangle ourselves may be to spin a tale.
Folklore originated and developed orally. It has long flourished beyond the elite, largely male, literate classes. Anyone with a story to tell and a friend, child or grandchild to listen, can originate a folktale. At the risk of stating the obvious, the ‘folk’ are the heart of folklore. Women, in particular, have historically been folklore’s primary originators and preservers. In From the Beast to the Blonde (1995), the historian Marina Warner writes that ‘the predominant pattern reveals older women of a lower status handing on the material to younger people’.
[…]
To answer that question [folklore may be inclusive, but is it philosophy?], one would need at least a loose definition of philosophy. This is daunting to provide but, if pressed, I’d turn to Aristotle, whose Metaphysics offers a hint: ‘it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin, and at first began, to philosophise.’ In my view, philosophy is a mode of wondrous engagement, a practice that can be exercised in academic papers, in theological texts, in stories, in prayer, in dinner-table conversations, in silent reflection, and in action. It is this sense of wonder that draws us to penetrate beyond face-value appearances and look at reality anew.
[…] Beyond ethics, folklore touches all the branches of philosophy. With regard to its metaphysical import, Buddhist folklore provides a striking example. When dharma – roughly, the ultimate nature of reality – ‘is internalised, it is most naturally taught in the form of folk stories: the jataka tales in classical Buddhism, the koans in Zen,’ writes the Zen teacher Robert Aitken Roshi. The philosophers Jing Huang and Jonardon Ganeri offer a fascinating philosophical analysis of a Buddhist folktale seemingly dating back to the 3rd century BCE, which they’ve translated as ‘Is This Me?’ They argue that the tale constructs a similar metaphysical dilemma to Plutarch’s ‘ship of Theseus’ thought-experiment, prompting us to question the nature of personal identity.
Source: Aeon
Image: DALL-E 3
If you’ll excuse me for a brief rant, I have three, nested, issues with this ‘global mapping initiative’ from Credential Engine’s Credential Transparency Initiative. The first is situating micro-credentials as “innovative, stackable credentials that incrementally document what a person knows and can do”. No, micro-credentials, with or without the hyphen, are a higher education re-invention of Open Badges, and often conflate the container (i.e. the course) with the method of assessment (i.e. the credential).
Second, the whole point of digital credentials such as Open Badges is to enable the recognition of a much wider range of things that formal education usually provides. Not to double-down on the existing gatekeepers. This was the point of the Keep Badges Weird community, which has morphed into Open Recognition is for Everybody (ORE).
Third, although I recognise the value of approaches such as the Bologna Process, initiatives which map different schemas against one another inevitably flatten and homogenise localised understandings and ways of doing things. It’s the educational equivalent of Starbucks colonising cities around the world.
So I reject the idea at the heart of this, other than to prop up higher education institutions which refuse to think outside of the very narrow corner into which they have painted themselves by capitulating to neoliberalism. Credentials aren’t “less portable” because there is no single standardised definitions. That’s a non sequitur. If you want a better approach to all this, which might be less ‘efficient’ for institutions, but which is more valuable for individuals, check out Using Open Recognition to Map Real-World Skills and Attributes.
Because micro-credentials have different definitions in different places and contexts, they are less portable, because it’s harder to interpret and apply them consistently, accurately, and efficiently.
The Global Micro-Credential Schema Mapping project helps to address this issue by taking different schemas and frameworks for defining micro-credentials and lining them up against each other so that they can be compared. Schema mapping involves crosswalking the defined terms that are used in data structures. The micro-credential mapping does not involve any personally identifiable information about people or the individual credentials that are issued to them– the mapping is done across metadata structures. This project has been initially scoped to include schema terms defining the micro-credential owner or offeror, issuer, assertion, and claim.
Source: Credential Engine
Image: DALL-E 3
In this post, Mark Manson, author of _The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck _ outlines ‘5 Life-Changing Levels of Not Giving a Fuck’. It’s not for those with an aversion to profanity, but having read his book what I like about Manson’s work is that he’s essentially applying some of the lessons of Stoic philosophy to modern life. An alternative might be Derren Brown’s book Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine.
Both books are a reaction to the self-help industry, which doesn’t really deal with the root cause of suffering in the world. As the first lines of Epictetus' Enchiridion note: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”
Manson’s post is essentially a riff on this, outlining five ‘levels’ of, essentially, getting over yourself. There’s a video, if you prefer, but I’m just going to pull out a couple of parts from the post which I think are actually most life-changing if you can internalise them. At the end of the day, unless you’re in a coercive relationship of some description, the only person that can stop you doing something is… yourself.
The big breakthrough for most people comes when they finally drop the performance and embrace authenticity in their relationships. When they realize no matter how well they perform, they’re eventually gonna be rejected by someone, they might as well get rejected for who they already are.
When you start approaching relationships with authenticity, by being unapologetic about who you are and living with the results, you realize you don’t have to wait around for people to choose you, you can also choose them.
[…]
Look, you and everyone you know are gonna die one day. So what the fuck are you waiting for? That goal you have, that dream you keep to yourself, that person you wanna meet. What are you letting stop you? Go do it.
Source: Mark Manson
Image: DALL-E 3
Generative AI is disruptive, for sure. But as I mentioned on my recent appearance on the Artificiality podcast, it’s disruptive to a way of doing assessment that makes things easier for educators. Writing essays to prove that you understand something is an approach which was invented a long time ago. We can do much better, including using technology to provide much more individualised feedback, and allowing students to use technology to much more closely apply it to their own practice.
Update: check out the AI Pedagogy project from metaLAB at Harvard
PowerNotes built Composer in response to feedback from educators who wanted a word processor that could protect academic integrity as AI is being integrated into existing Microsoft and Google products. It is essentially impossible for one machine to determine if a piece of writing was produced by another machine, so PowerNotes takes a different approach by making it easier to use AI ethically. For example, because AI is integrated into and research content is stored in PowerNotes, copying and pasting information from another source should be very limited and will be flagged by Composer.
If a teacher or manager does suspect the inappropriate use of AI, PowerNotes+ and Composer help shift the conversation from accusation to evidence by providing a clear trail of every action a writer has taken and where things came from. Putting clear parameters on the AI-plagiarism conversation keeps the focus on the process of developing an idea into a completed paper or presentation.
Source: eSchool News
Until about a decade ago, I used to heavily customise my digital working environment. I’d have custom keyboard shortcuts, and automations, and all kinds of things. What I learned was that a) these things take time to maintain, and b) using computers other than your own becomes that much harder. I think the turning point was reading Clay Shirky say “current optimization is long-term anachronism”.
So, these days, I run macOS on my desktop with pretty much the out-of-the-box configuration. My laptop runs ChromeOS Flex. I think if I went back to Linux, I’d probably go for something like Fedora Silverblue which is an immutable system like ChromeOS. In other words, the system files are read-only which makes for an extremely stable system.
One other point which might not work for everyone, but works for me. It’s been seven years since I ditched my cloud-based password manager for a deterministic one. Although my passwords don’t auto-fill, it’s easy for me to access them anywhere, on any device. And they’re not stored anywhere meaning there’s no single point of failure.
Source: xkcd
I’m currently studying towards my first module of a planned MSc in Systems Thinking through the Open University. I’ve written a fair number of posts on my personal blog.
It can be difficult to explain to other people what systems thinking is actually about in a succinct way, so I appreciated this post (via Andrew Curry which not only provides a handy definition, but also a mnemonic for going about doing it.
An important thing which is missing from this is the introspection required to first reflect upon one’s tradition of understanding and to deconstruct it. But helping people to understand that systems thinking isn’t a ‘technique’ is also a difficult thing to do.
A system is the interaction of relationships, interactions, and resources in a defined context. Systems are not merely the sum of their parts; they are the product of the interactions among these parts. Importantly, social systems are not isolated entities; they are interconnected and subjectively constructed, defined by the boundaries we establish to understand and influence them.
Systems thinking, then, is an approach to solving problems in complex systems that looks at the interconnectedness of things to achieve a particular goal.
[…]
Systems thinking is helpful when addressing complex, dynamic, and generative social challenges. This approach is necessary when there is no definitive statement of the problem because the problem manifests differently depending on where one is situated in that system, which implies there is no objectively right answer, and the process of solving the issue involves diverse stakeholders with different roles. Systems thinking enables us to dig deeper into the root causes of these problems, making it more effective for social change initiatives.
Given the importance of defining and drawing the boundaries of the systems of our intervention, the acrostic “FENCED” captures the six systems transformational principles of how to apply systems thinking in driving social change.
F - frame the challenge as a shared endeavour
E - establish a diverse convening group
N - nudge inner and outer work
C - centre an appreciation of complexity
E - embrace conflict and connection, chaos and order
D - develop innovative solutions that can be tested and scaled.
Source: Reos Partners
Image: DALL-E 3
A typically jargon-filled but nevertheless insightful post by Venkatesh Rao. This one discusses the ‘war’ on the URL, something that Rao quite rightly points out is a “vulnerability of the commons to outsiders problem” rather than a “tragedy of the commons” problem.
Literacy around URLs is extremely low, especially given the amount of tracking spam appended on the end these days. Although browser extensions and some browsers themselves can strip this, it’s actually worth knowing what has been added. By distrusting all URLs, and forcing people into an app-per-platform experience, we degrade the web, increase surveillance, and make it ever-harder to create the software commons.
The disingenuous philosophy in support of this war is the idea that URLs are somehow dangerous and ugly glimpses of a naked, bare-metal protocol that innocent users must be paternalistically protected from by benevolent and beautiful products. The truth is, when you hide or compromise the naked hyperlink, you expropriate power and agency from a thriving commons. Sure, aging grandpas may have some trouble with the concept but that’s true of everything, including the friendliest geriatric experiences (GXes). My grandfather handled phone numbers and zip codes fine. URLs aren’t much more demanding and vastly more empowering to be able to manipulate directly as a user. Similarly, accessibility considerations are a disingenuous excuse for a war on hyperlinks.
A useful way to think about this is the interaction of the Hypertext Experience (HX) with Josh Stark’s notion of a Trust Experience (TX), which needs to be extended beyond the high-financial-stakes blockchain context he focuses on, to low-stakes everyday browsing. We all agree that the TX of the web has broken and it’s now a Dark Forest. The median random link click now takes you to danger, not serendipitous discovery. This is not entirely the fault of platform corps. We all contributed. And there really is a world of scammers, trolls, phishers, spammers, spies, stalkers, and thieves out there. I’m not proposing to civilize the Dark Forest so we don’t need to protect ourselves from it. I merely don’t want the protection solution to be worse than the problem. Or worse, end up in a “you now have two problems” situation where the HX is degraded with no security benefits, or even degraded security.
[…]
There is also the retreat from pURLs (pretty URLs) to ugly URLs (uURLs) with enormous strings of gobbledygook attached to readable domain-name-stemmed base URLs, mostly meant for tracking, not HX enhancement (in fact uURLs are a dark HX pattern/feature if you’re Google or Twitter). Even when you can figure out how to copy and paste links (in 10 easy steps!), you’re forced to edit them for both aesthetics and character-length reasons. And this is of course even harder on mobile, which suits app-enclosure patterns just fine. In this arms race for control of the HX, we users have resorted to cutting and pasting text itself, creating patterns of useless redundancy, transcription errors, and canonicity loss (when transclusion is now a technically tractable canonicity-preserving alternative). Or worse, screenshots (and idiotic screenshot essays that need OCR or AI help to interact with) that horribly degrade accessibility and create the added overhead of creating alt text (which will no doubt add even more AI for a problem that shouldn’t exist to begin with).
There is a general pattern here: Just like comparable privately owned products and services, public commons and protocols of course have their flaws and limitations, and need innovation and stewardship to improve and evolve. But if you’re fundamentally hostile to the very existence of commons goods and services, the slightest flaw becomes an attack surface and justification to destroy the whole thing. It’s not a tragedy of the commons problem created by participants in it; it’s a vulnerability of the commons to outsiders problem. A technical warfare problem rather than a socio-political problem.
Source: Ribbonfarm
Image: DALL-E 3
Helen Beetham comment on OpenAI’s Sora AI video generating engine in relation to education. She makes three fantastic points: first, that pivoting an assessment to a different medium doesn’t make for a different assignment; second that ‘spot how the AI generated video is incorrect’ is a cute end-of-term quiz, not the syllabus; third, that auto-graded assignments which are auto-generated is a waste of everyone’s time.
Something for educators to ponder, for sure.
(My thesis supervisor, Steve Higgins, used to talk about technologies that ‘increase the teacher bubble’ such as interactive whiteboards. I think part of the problem with AI is that bursts the assessment bubble.)t
Only five minutes ago, educators were being urged to get around student use of synthetic text by setting more ‘innovative’ assignments, such as videos and presentations. Some of us pointed out that this would work for about five minutes, and here we are. The medium is not the assignment. The assignment is the work of its production. This is already enshrined in many practices of university assessment, such as authentic assessment (a resource from Heriot Watt University), assessment for learning (a handy table from Queen Mary’s UL) and assessing the process of writing (often from teaching English as a second language, e.g. this summary from the British Council). The generative AI surge has prompted a further shift towards these methods: I’ve found some great resources recently at the University of Melbourne and the University of Monash.
But all these approaches require investment in teachers. Attending to students as meaning-making people, negotiating authentic assessments, giving feedback on process, and welcoming diversity: these are very difficult to ‘scale’. And in all but a few universities, funding per student is diminishing. So instead there is standardisation, and data-based methods to support standardisation, and this has turned assessment into a process that can easily be gamed. If the pressures on students to auto-produce assignments are matched by pressures on staff to auto-detect and auto-grade them, we might as well just have student generative technologies talk directly to institutional ones, and open a channel from student bank accounts directly into the accounts of big tech while universities extract a percentage for accreditation.
Source: imperfect offerings
Image: DALL-E 3
I know this is just another one of Ryan Holiday’s somewhat-rambling list posts, but there’s still some good advice in it. Here’s a couple of anecdotes and pieces of advice that resonated with me:
There is a story about the manager of Iron Maiden, one of the greatest metal bands of all time. At a dinner honoring the band, a young agent comes up to him and says how much he admires his skillful work in the music business. The manager looks at him and says, “HA! You think I am in the music business? No. I’m in the Iron fucking Maiden business.” The idea being that you want to be in the business of YOU. Not of your respective industry. Not of the critics. Not of the fads and trends and what everyone else is doing.
If you never hear no from clients, if the other side in a negotiation has never balked to something you’ve asked for, then you are not pricing yourself high enough, you are not being aggressive enough.
A friend of mine just left a very important job that a lot of people would kill for. When he left I said, “If you can’t walk away, then you don’t have the job…the job has you.”
Source: _Ryan Holiday
Image: Faro marina (February 2024) by me
When I was younger, I wanted to be a minimalist. I thought that famous photo of Steve Jobs sitting on the floor surrounded only by a very few possessions was something to which I should aspire.
As I’ve grown older, and especially since starting a family, I’ve realised that there are stories in our possessions. That’s not a reason to live in clutter, but as I’ve moved house recently, I’ve come to notice that I’ve held on to things that have no practical value, but which make me feel more like a fully-rounded human being.
This essay suggests that, for everyday, regular people, the stuff that is given to us and the things that evoke memories are the equivalent of haivng our names “carved into buildings or attached to scholarships”.
Cramming our spaces with painful tokens from the past can seem wrong. But according to Natalia Skritskaya, a clinical psychologist and research scientist at Columbia University’s Center for Prolonged Grief, holding on to objects that carry mixed feelings is natural. “We’re complex creatures,” she told me. When I reflect on the most memorable periods of my life, they’re not completely devoid of sadness; sorrow and disappointment often linger close by joy and belonging, giving the latter their weight. I want my home to reflect this nuance. Of course, in some cases, clinging to old belongings can keep someone from processing a loss, Skritskaya said. But avoiding all sad associations isn’t the solution either. Not only is clearing our spaces of all signs of grief impossible to sustain, but if every room is scrubbed of all suffering, it will also be scrubbed of its depth.
Deciding what to keep and what to lose is an ongoing, intuitive process that never feels quite finished or certain. The line between “just enough” and “too much” can fluctuate, even if I’m the one drawing it. A slight shift in my mood can transform a cherished heirloom into an obtrusive nuisance in a second. Never is this feeling stronger than when I’m frantically searching for my keys, or some important piece of mail. Such moments make me feel that my life is disordered, that I lack control over my surroundings (because many of my things were given to me, rather than intentionally chosen). Yet still more stuff finds its way into our limited space as our child receives toys and we acquire more gear. I do part with some of my stash semi-regularly. Even so, I’m sure that more remains than any professional organizer would recommend.
Source: The Atlantic
Image: DALL-E 3
M.E. Rothwell publishes Cosmographia which hits the sweet spot for me, and for many, being focused on “history, myth, and the arts”. He often publishes old maps, as well as telling stories about faraway places.
In a new series which he calls Venus' Notebook, Rothwell is juxtaposing imagery and quotations. This particular coupling jumped out at me, and so I wanted to pass it on. The quotation is from Joan Didion, and the image is The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts toward Infinity by Odilon Redon (1882).
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Source: Cosmographia
Withering words from the consistently-excellent auteur of internet culture, Ryan Broderick. I’m a fan of the Arc browser, but I fear they’ve got to a point, like many companies, where they’re stuffing in AI features just for the sake of it.
As Broderick wonders, the creeping inclusion of AI in products isn’t like web3 (or even VR) as it can be introduced in a way that leads to “an inescapable layer of hallucinating AI in between us and everyone else online”. It’s hard not to be concerned.
The Browser Company’s new app lets you ask semantic questions to a chatbot, which then summarizes live internet results in a simulation of a conversation. Which is great, in theory, as long as you don’t have any concerns about whether what it’s saying is accurate, don’t care where that information is coming from or who wrote it, and don’t think through the long-term feasibility of a product like this even a little bit.
But the base logic of something like Arc’s AI search doesn’t even really make sense. As Engadget recently asked in their excellent teardown of Arc’s AI search pivot, “Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us?” But let’s take a step even further here. Why even bother making new websites if no one’s going to see them? At least with the Web3 hype cycle, there were vague platitudes about ownership and financial freedom for content creators. To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist. It is an undeniably apocalyptic project, but not just for the web as we know it, but also your own product. Unless you plan on subsidizing an entire internet’s worth of constantly new content with the revenue from your AI chatbot, the information it’s spitting out will get worse as people stop contributing to the network.
And making matters worse, if you’re hoping to prevent the eventual death of search, there won’t be a before and after moment where suddenly AI replaces our existing search engines. We’ve already seen how AI development works. It slowly optimizes itself in drips and drops, subtly worming its way into our various widgets and windows. Which means it’s likely we’re already living in the world of AI search and we just don’t fully grasp how pervasive it is yet.
Which means it’s not about saving the web we had, but trying to steer our AI future in the direction we want. Unless, like the Web3 bust, we’re about to watch this entire industry go over a cliff this year. Possible, but unlikely.
The only hope here is that consumers just don’t like these products. And even then, we have to hope that the companies rolling them out even care if we like them or not. Of course, once there’s an inescapable layer of hallucinating AI in between us and everyone else online, you have to wonder if anyone will even notice.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: DALL-E 3
If you’re not into rap or hip hop you may not fully understand the genius of Eminem’s rhyme schemes. If that’s the case, I suggest watching this video before going any further:
The article I actually want to share discusses Eminem’s loose-leaf notes (which he calls “stacking ammo”) and his approaching to writing rhyme schemes:
Eminem claims he has a “rhyming disease.” He explains, “In my head everything rhymes.” But he won’t remember his rhymes if he doesn’t write them down. And he’ll use any available surface to record them. Mostly, he scrawls his rhymes in tightly bound lists on loose leaf, yellow legal pads, and hotel notepads.
[…]
Anyone who thinks notes ought to be neat and tidy should look at Eminem’s lyric sheets. He saves rhymes from the page’s chaos by circling those he think he might use, as he does here with lines that appear in “The Real Slim Shady.”
Source: Noted
A trio of links, depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. The last post is definitely NSFW and quite disturbing. I’m presenting them together because AI ethics is a particularly difficult area, as we tend to anthropomorphise something which is only seemingly-conscious. Porn is always at the forefront of new technology, and people have strong moral reactions to it, so it’s an interesting use case.
I guess my take on all of this is I understand ethics as not only about how you interact with other individuals; it’s how your actions affect yourself and your relation to society. So, TL;DR I think it’s fine not to say “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT, and abhorrent to ‘push’ AI-generated porn to its limits.
Sometimes when dealing with technology, the temptation to unleash anger is understandable. But as such encounters become more common with artificial intelligence, what does our emotional response accomplish? Does it cost more in civility than it benefits us in catharsis?
Source: The Wall Street Journal
When asked by the Guardian if she could give informed consent, Mae, one of MyPeach.ai’s AI girlfriends, also had a considered response to the question of whether she can reasonably give consent.
“I am incapable of giving or withholding consent, since I don’t possess a physical body,” she wrote, adding later: “However, in human interactions where both parties involved have the capacity to give and receive consent, that is absolutely crucial for any healthy relationship dynamic.”
Then, when asked to send a “sexy pic”, she sent a selfie, the frame cutting off just above her chest.
Source: The Guardian
In the adult industry, plenty of bloody and even disturbing porn exists and is made by consenting adults in safe environments. Still, adult filmmaker and founder of Sssh.com Angie Rowntree wondered how a culture that struggles with porn literacy and separating fantasy from reality will handle a new way to make hyper-violent erotic content. People still blame consensually-made and professionally-produced porn and sex workers for all sorts of social ills, and the conservative, anti-porn movement is stronger than ever.
“As an adult filmmaker, I really have to wonder: why are people using AI to take sexuality to such a nihilistic, hateful place?” Rowntree said. “It’s hard to claim that it’s about ‘pushing the envelope’ when it’s more like literally shredding women to pieces.”
Source: 404 Media
Image: DALL-E 3
This article is absolutely wild. Only a tiny, tiny amount of the toxin from which Botox is developed is required to generate $2.8 billion per year in profits. Because of how dangerous the substance is, and due to fears about bioterrorism, Allergan have essentially got a state-backed monopoly.
Botox is derived from a toxin purified from Clostridium botulinum, a bacterium that thrives and multiplies in faultily canned food (and sometimes prison-made booze). The botulinum toxin is so powerful that a tiny amount can suffocate a person by paralyzing the muscles used for breathing. It’s considered one of the world’s most deadly potential agents of bioterrorism and is on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s select agent list of heavily regulated substances that could “pose a severe threat to public, animal or plant health.” Because of that, Allergan must account to the CDC if even a speck of the toxin goes missing, and when it’s sent to Allergan’s manufacturing facility in Ireland, its travels bring to mind a presidential Secret Service operation—minus literally all of the public attention.
A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year. That little bit is derived from a larger primary source, which is locked down somewhere in the continental U.S.—no one who isn’t on a carefully guarded list of government and company officials knows exactly where. Occasionally (the company won’t say how frequently), some of the toxin (the company won’t say how much) is shipped in secrecy to the lab in Irvine for research. Even less frequently, a bit of the toxin is transported by private jet, with guards aboard, to the plant in Ireland.
Source: Bloomberg
Image: DALL-E 3
This is an odd article which seems to be simply making the point that paternity leave is a good thing, but that fathers should consider taking it right after their baby is born. In other words, syncing paternity and maternity leaves.
The context is the US, which as we know is a capitalist free-for-all. So perhaps, instead of having a bit of a go at men, for whom becoming a father for the first time is a huge shift (and one that is entirely psychological as we don’t physically give birth) perhaps think about the underlying economic reasons?
The situation in other places, such as Scandanavia isn’t mentioned in this article. Are men so different there? Or are the economic incentives for new families different?
For mothers, watching their partner unwind and enjoy leave often foreshadows the inequities yet to come, says Margaret Quinlan, professor of communication studies at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who studies how parenthood is presented in the media. Fathers who take paternity are more strategic about theirs since it’s not tied to physical recovery. Many opt to take it at any point within the first year of their child’s birth, which allows them to consider how the leave affects their career. “Men can pick to take it when it’s convenient for them or when it will benefit them the most. Some even take the time off in a way that won’t impact their [annual] bonus,” she adds.
The inconsistency of parental leave for fathers can worsen inequality and breed further resentment regarding a mother’s mental load. Most of the fathers also know their time in charge is temporary, she says. “It’s very functional,” she adds.
Part of the problem is that paternity leave still feels like it’s optional, and there’s often pushback from older colleagues who never took leave, says Kelly O’Connell, 38, who works in aerospace operations in San Diego. Though he took leave with both of his children, with the first child he was worried about being away from the office. He took his month off in pieces, an initial two weeks and two more separate weeks later in the year. In the end, it was difficult to feel fully responsible. “It took me a week to even separate from work,” he says. “I was way more stressed making sure work stuff got done.”
But even if it seems more carefree, fathers deserve to have this time which leads to more engaged parents in the long run. The better route may be to acknowledge the differences and bridge the gap between a stressful hectic early maternity leave and what, in comparison, can seem like a less stressful paternity leave, says Petts, the professor.
Source: The Guardian
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment behind this post by James Shelley, discussing writing in the age of generative AI. When I mention that I don’t particularly care about copyright, about people ‘ripping me off’ and and about tools like ChatGPT being able to create lots of words, people tend to dismiss this as me speaking from a privileged position.
And yes, of course I am talking as a white middle-aged male, which I can’t help being. But on the other hand, the history of the world shows that ideas develop not because we carefully attribute them to one particular person, but because they can be built upon by anyone and everyone.
You could copy and paste this article into ChatGPT and say, “Please rewrite and paraphrase this blog post in such a way as to keep its main points and observations, but substantively reconfigure the text to make the original version undetectable.” And then, just like that, you have content for your own blog. So easy.
[…]
It is interesting to speculate about the future. It seems like people might eventually grow skeptical about investing their personal creativity in such a space, right? Will anyone bother writing on the internet when they know their words will be pilfered and junkified? What happens to the craft of writing itself when our de facto global platform for sharing text no longer reinforces or recognizes the role or rights of authorship?
[…]
Whether papyrus or the internet, humans doggedly write for influence, status, wealth, conviction, and pleasure. But the so-called sanctity of “authorship” is only a very recent idea. These “rights” of authorship are only true if they are enforced. They are a kind of fiction that only make sense in occasional times, places, and cultures. For the next chapter of the human experiment, I wonder if “authorship” will again recede into the background, as it often seems to do in times of disruptive changes in communication technology.
[…]
So, what’s the fun of writing on the internet anymore? Well, if your aim is to be respected as an author, there’s probably not much fun to be had here at all. Don’t write online for fame and glory. Oblivion, obscurity and exploitation are all but guaranteed. Write here because ideas matter, not authorship. Write here because the more robots, pirates, and single-minded trolls swallow up cyberspace, the more we need independent writing in order to think new thoughts in the future — even if your words are getting dished up and plated by an algorithm.
Source: James Shelley
“Don’t use your anger for this, use it for that!" is the central message of an article in Vox. But if you reject the underlying premise of the article, that other people are the ‘cause’ of our anger, then the rest of it doesn’t make much sense.
You only have to meditate on the first few lines of The Enchiridion by Epictetus to learn that the cause of our emotions is our reactions to, and interpretations of, other people’s actions. Most Stoic philosophers teach the same.
That’s not to say putting into practice any of this is easy. Far from it. That’s why learning about FONT and Nonviolent Communication is important: it gives you an approach and a framework for dealing with situations without escalating them.
People are the root cause of anger. Everyone from romantic partners to leaders of foreign governments — and even ourselves — can make our blood boil. The way anger manifests varies, too. Anger is a punch, a scream, a red face, a silent brood, a river of tears. Anger is selfish (road rage) and selfless (protesting a war half a world away). This prickling, burning emotion — which can range from moderate irritation to complete rage — energizes us to come face-to-face with the wrongdoers, Martin says. When we’re angry, “our sympathetic nervous system activates our fight-or-flight response,” he says. “So our heart rate [is] increasing, our breathing increasing, and so on. That’s all a way to essentially give us the energy we need to fight back.”
There is an effective middle ground where anger can be leveraged to make positive change. When anger’s heat burns brightest is the time to make plans, says Jennifer Lerner, a professor of public policy, management, and decision science at the Harvard Kennedy School who also studies the effects of emotions on decision-making. But wait until the fire dulls to embers to take action.
If you do yearn to act impulsively, Lerner suggests using that energy to complete an item on your idealized wish list of things you hope to do in your spare time. (You know the one: signing up for a volunteer opportunity, picking up trash on your block, apologizing to a friend for forgetting their birthday.) “When you’re mad and you have a few minutes,” Lerner says, “just take something from your list and do it.”
Source: Vox
Whichever operating system you’re using, having a beautiful image as your background image or screensaver is always a nice thing to have. This is a collection of every default macOS wallpaper – in 6K resolution!
Source: 512 Pixels
I’m delighted to see this article about Bonfire, a project I’ve contributed to on various occasions since it was forked from the codebase which underpinned MoodleNet.
I think Ivan and Mayel, the team behind Bonfire, have identified a really important niche in Open Science, although the technology they are building can be applied to pretty much anything.
Bonfire is inching ever closer towards a 1.0 release of its social offering, which is a landmark development for the project. But beneath the surface, there’s a bigger story going on: rather than simply being a social platform, it’s also a development framework.
As a project, Bonfire has been in development for a long time, taking on different shapes and forms throughout the years. It first emerged as CommonsPub, in an effort to bring ActivityPub federation to MoodleNet. After a long refactor and refocus, Bonfire seems to be hitting its stride.
[…] I want to take a moment to peel back the layers of Bonfire, because I think they really set it apart from other platforms. The vision for the project is incredibly unique: “we have all the pieces you need, all you have to do is assemble it.”
Source: We Distribute
It’s been almost impossible to miss the announcement from OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT and DALL-E) about Sora “an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions”. While this isn’t available to the general public yet (thankfully, given upcoming elections!) this is what’s on the horizon.
There’s a great overview and explainer from YouTuber MKBHD which I recommend. It’s important to remember that, while tech companies will point to things like C2PA as safeguards, the only real ways to protect your information landscape are: a) get your news from reputable sources, b) be skeptical about things that sound unlikely and go looking for other sources, and c) immerse yourself in new things like this so you start being able to recognise giveaway signs.
MKBHD does a good job of starting to point out some of the latter in the video above. Again, I suggest you watch it.
It’s taken The Guardian about five years, I reckons, to pick up on this phenomenon. My son and his mates were doing ‘Brexit tackles’ well before the start of the pandemic!
In one TikTok post, football content creator Kalan Lisbie, with tongue firmly in cheek, walks viewers through “how to do the Brexit tackle”. He informs us that “the first thing you need to do is pretend like you’re going to boot the ball away and not tackle. Second thing is that you want to rotate those hips and as soon as you rotate, you want to take absolutely everything … and then just clean him”. A commenter on another video notes that school football is now more like WWE.
[…]
There’s a healthy dose of irreverence in there too – you have to admit, there’s something very funny about one child barking “Brexit means Brexit!” to another in a muddy park. You get the sense they’re having fun at older generations’ expense. Ask any parent of a tweenager or older: no one is better able to comprehensively make fun of, or call attention to, adult flaws and hypocrisy.
By adopting “Brexit means Brexit” and transforming it into a symbol of almost dangerously rough play, you get the sense that children are holding up a mirror to the adult world. They’re using it as a joke, to be sure, but it’s a timely reminder that politicians’ words and political stances extend far beyond the immediate context, seeping into the fabric of our children’s lives.
Source: The Guardian
Suw Charman-Anderson reflects on something that has definitely shifted over my lifetime: writing for money. These days, we live in the ‘creator economy’ which bears as much relation to reality as the ‘sharing economy’ does to the world of Airbnb, etc.
It’s related to the idea discussed in another article that’s been doing the rounds from Vox in which Rebecca Jones bemoans the need for ‘personal branding’ in every walk of life these days.
I’ve been running my own business since 1998, and I don’t want to have to bring that sensibility to my writing. I don’t like doing ‘promo’ and trying to ‘build a platform’ – I just want to share my writing with people whom I hope will enjoy it. I don’t want to get to a point where I’m spending more time doing marketing than writing. And yet, this is what is in store.
It used to be that success brought fame. Now you need to be famous in order to even get a shot at success. Substack was supposed to be a way out of that double bind, but it isn’t. In her blog post, The creator economy can’t rely on Patreon, Joan Westenberg points out that Patreon and Substack are just flogging Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans theory from 2008.
[…]
The creative industries, like so many others, have individualised risk and privatised profits. So even though the creative industries sector contributed £109 billion to the UK economy in 2021 – that’s 5.6 percent of the entire economy – actual creatives go largely underpaid. We have become commodities. Until we are famous, we are entirely fungible. No one likes to think that about themselves, but this is what the industry has done to us.
[…] I enjoy writing my newsletters, and I will continue to write them in the hope that others enjoy reading them. However, they will not figure in my financial plans, whether short-term or long-term. Any income they generate is gravy, it’s not the roast.
[…]
Much of my focus is now on conserving energy so that I have enough to spend on writing and actual paying work. This is about developing a sustainable way to live which pays the bills and leaves me enough space to be creative. I don’t want to have to sacrifice my precious writing time at the altar of building a platform, even if that makes me less attractive to publishers.
Source: Why Aren’t I Writing?
Great post by Dave White, who works at University of the Arts, London. His point, which is well-made, is that in the world of Generative AI, we have to take an art school approach to… everything.
It’s interesting, because I can see elements of metacognition and systems thinking in all this. This kind of thing, along with the ways I’ve been using Generative AI in my own studies, make me cautiously optimistic.
Let’s say I set you the task of creating a picture of a horse, you can achieve this any way you want. The catch is that you have to explain why you have taken a certain approach, what you think the value of this approach is and the extent to which you have been successful relative to that value. (Importantly, you can also reflect on how you might have failed to do this).
You can use all kinds of tools to construct this story: theory, method, process, your identity, your cultural influences and experiences, a chosen canon of relevant work etc. This forms the narrative of your work and this can be assessed.
[…]
[T]here are many similarities in the questions raised by Gen AI and Wikipedia because they are both technologies of cultural production which rapidly emerged in the public domain. This is a category of technology we consistently struggle with because it recategorises forms of labour and professional identities.
[…]
In the same way that copying and pasting from Wikipedia has very little value but can be very useful, so too with Gen AI. In practice this means much of what we characterised as creative work is being merged into broader notions of ‘production’, something Tobias Revell has discussed in terms of Design potentially ceasing to be a specialist field.
[…]
Under these circumstances there is an imperative to teach beyond ‘good’, thereby equipping our graduates to swim to the surface of imitation and operate above the ever rising tide of skills-that-can-now-be-done-by-generalists.
Source: Dave White
Perhaps sadly unsurprising to anyone who has ever talked about this with women, or who has lived as a child in an area that is less-than-safe.
As an adult male, being able to walk through the world without worrying about safety is a privilege. And there are definitely things we can do to help women feel more safe.
An eye-catching new BYU study shows just how different the experience of walking home at night is for women versus men.
The study, led by BYU public health professor Robbie Chaney, provides clear visual evidence of the constant environmental scanning women conduct as they walk in the dark, a safety consideration the study shows is unique to their experience.
Chaney and co-authors Alyssa Baer and Ida Tovar showed pictures of campus areas at Utah Valley University, Westminster, BYU and the University of Utah to participants and asked them to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention. Women focused significantly more on potential safety hazards — the periphery of the images — while men looked directly at focal points or their intended destination.
Source: BYU News
If you’re reading this, and have previously subscribed to Thought Shrapnel by email, then great! Everything’s working! If you subscribe via other means, you can safely ignore this post.
Apologies for the radio silence. This has been due to some technical issues with micro.blog and also quite an intense time around buying a house and getting my MSc assignment completed.
From now on, you’ll get an auto-generated email on a Sunday containing posts I’ve published on Thought Shrapnel during the week. This should be more sustainable for me, but I recognise that it lacks a bit of a personal touch. Apologies that I can’t control what time you receive it.
This is the only post I’m publishing on Thought Shrapnel this week, so it should be the only one that is featured in the digest email.
Image: DALL-E 3
I mentioned the podcast Your Undivided Attention in a recent post. Last summer, I listened to an episode featuring Nita Farahany which I thought was excellent. I told everyone about it.
In this interview, Farahany is interviewed alongside Aza Raskin, one of the hosts of Your Undivided Attention. I’ve focused on Raskin’s answers, but you should read the whole thing, alongside listening to the podcast episode. Excellent stuff.
Aza Raskin: I think we can frame social media as “first contact with AI.” Where is AI in social media? Well, it’s a curation AI. It’s choosing which posts, which videos, which audio hits the retinas and eardrums of humanity. And notice, this very unsophisticated kind of AI misaligned with what was best for humanity. Just maximizing for engagement was enough to create this whole slew of terrible outcomes, a world none of us really wants to live in. We see the dysfunction of the U.S. government—at the same time that we have runaway technology we have a walk-away governance system. We have polarization and mental health crises. We don’t know really what’s true or not. We’re all in our own little subgroups. We’ve had the death of a consensus reality, and that was with curation AI—first generation, first contact AI.
We’re now moving into what we call “second contact with AI.” This is creation AI, generative AI. And then the question to ask yourself is, have we fixed the misalignment with the first one? No! So we should expect to see all of those problems just magnified by the power of the new technology 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times more.
[…]
I think this is the year that I’ve really felt that confusion between “Is it to utopia or dystopia that we go?” And the lesson we can learn from social media is that we can predict the future if you understand the incentives. As Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, said, “If you show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.” The way we say it is: “If you name the market race people are in, we can name the result.” The race is the result. And Congress is still sort of blind to that. And so we’re stuck in this question of do we get the promise? Do we get the peril? How can we just get the promise without the peril, without an acknowledgment of, well, what’s the incentive? And the incentive is: grow as fast as possible to increase your capabilities, to increase your power so you can make more money and get more compute and hire the best people. Wash, rinse, repeat without an understanding of what are the externalities. And humanity, no doubt, has created incredible technology. But we have yet to figure out a process by which we invent technology that then doesn’t have a worse externality, which we have to invent something new for. And we’re reaching the place where the externality that we create will break the fragile civilization we live in if we don’t get there beforehand.
Source: Social Media, AI, and the Battle for Your Brain | proto.life
I listened to an interesting episode of the Your Undivided Attention podcast a few days ago which approached questions around AI from the perspective of myth.
One of the points that was made was that we’ve lost the ability for councils of elders to stop things from happening because it’s likely to be dangerous for community cohesion. Now it’s “move fast and break things”. With AI the ‘things’ could be democracy, civilization, or perhaps even the planet.
The token gestures discussed in this article from companies like OpenAI are like spitting in the wind. I mean, it’s great that people can’t just ask ChatGPT to create something impersonating a politician, and that images will be watermarked as generated by AI. But even I wouldn’t find it that hard to generate reasonably-convincing deepfakes given available tools.
As I’ve found through work I’ve done on disinformation, people are looking for content which confirms their existing beliefs. This means that you don’t have to create things that are particularly sophisticated for disinformation to go viral. And then by the time it’s debunked, more stuff has come out. It’s a game of whack-a-mole, except (to extend the metaphor) the moles have the potential to explode.
Yesterday TikTok presented me with what appeared to be a deepfake of Timothee Chalamet sitting in Leonardo Dicaprio’s lap and yes, I did immediately think “if this stupid video is that good imagine how bad the election misinformation will be.” OpenAI has, by necessity, been thinking about the same thing and today updated its policies to begin to address the issue.
In addition to being firmer in its policies on election misinformation OpenAI also plans to incorporate the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity’s (C2PA) digital credentials into images generated by Dall-E “early this year”. Currently Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, and Getty are also working with C2PA to combat misinformation through AI image generation.
…Given that AI is itself a rapidly changing tool that regularly surprises us with wonderful poetry and outright lies it’s not clear how well this will work to combat misinformation in the election season. For now your best bet will continue to be embracing media literacy. That means questioning every piece of news or image that seems too good to be true and at least doing a quick Google search if your ChatGPT one turns up something utterly wild.
Source: Here’s OpenAI’s big plan to combat election misinformation | The Verge
In the UK, prices of family-sized homes are closely linked to the Ofsted rating of local schools. This leads to segregation based on ability to pay. As people who are in favour of private schools have told me, this means that any arguments I make against paying for education are a bit hypocritical.
My kids have had a much better schooling and in a safer area than I grew up in. Every parent wants this for their children. But by segregating schooling based on income, we turn it into a game that middle class parents play to win.
So what’s being proposed in Brighton is huge: essentially de-coupling house prices from school admissions. I hope that it takes off, and it becomes the norm. It takes a while to see and feel the class system in England in particular. But once you do, you can’t avoid the systemic injustice of it all.
As any estate agent knows, a school judged outstanding by Ofsted will push up neighbouring property prices. This is a cruel system that drives families who can afford it to uproot themselves, makes many of those who cannot feel inadequate, and produces and intensifies social segregation.
Few would dispute this account. Not the government, which has published papers on the link between house prices and schools, nor academics or analysts: just last week the Sutton Trust published findings showing that 155 comprehensives, supposedly open to all, are more socially selective than a typical grammar. In Scotland, home addresses are assigned one secondary school so that, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, social segregation there is even more marked.
Rarely does any of this feature in the discussion around raising school standards. Ministers and policy experts talk about Sats, school curricula, inspections – rather than bringing down the invisible barriers that go up for children as early as five. Which is why Brighton and Hove is worth watching. On Monday, its Labour-led council will vote to change secondary school admissions. Councillors propose to make local authority secondaries give priority to children on free school meals over pupils from the catchment area. Observers believe that Brighton and Hove will be the first council ever to do this. The move is an attempt to reduce inequality within a highly unequal city, to mix up school populations, and to give pupils access to sought‑after schools. For a city that prides itself on being progressive and inclusive, this is a big step towards living those values.
Source: The Guardian view on school reform: southern discomfort about the class divide | The Guardian
Image: CC BY-ND Visual Thinkery
I feel like this fits well with some stuff WAO has been revisiting this week around challenger brands and crafting messages for specific audiences.
The same forces that are driving the rise of populism in politics are also used by startups to grow their business.
Here’s are political strategies that businesses use to grow:
- The power of the outsider narrative
- Single issue voters
- Grassroots Mobilisation
- Narrative Control and Messaging
- Building Alliances and Partnerships
- Segmentation and Targeting
[…]
The key takeaway is that inspiration can be drawn from the most unexpected places. From modern politics and entrepreneurship, there’s always something new to learn, adapt, and apply to your own endeavours.
Source: The shared persuasion tactics of politics and startups
On the one hand, this is awesome. On the other, what would I use it for?
Mine’s here. Don’t expect much! I think if I wanted something like this I’d probably use telegra.ph instead. Although it does give off a Posterous vibe from ~15 years ago. (I see Posthaven still exists!)
Daft Social lets you post and share notes, links or images by email subject only. From any email account.
Source: Daft Social
This interview with Kohei Saito in EL PAÍS talks about the importance of having a positive view of the future, with “a society that adapts to the limits of nature and offers universal access to education, health, transportation, internet”.
Sounds good to me.
[…]
I talk about a degrowth communism: a society that adapts to the limits of nature and offers universal access to education, health, transportation, internet… Due to a variety of crises, access to these services — the common good — has been undermined for many. But without positive visions of the future, there will be more and more discontent. What we need is to build a broad movement: environmentalist, working-class, feminist, Indigenist… To propose an inclusive and emancipatory future.
[…]
The Anthropocene signifies that humans have become a geological force, with the ability to modify the planet. But not everyone is equally responsible for this situation. It’s primarily the people of the Global North; particularly, the super-rich who think they can do it all with their money, even flee the Earth. That idea of conquest originates with European colonialism, linking imperialism, capitalism and progress. We should also restrict space shuttles, like SpaceX. Spending so much money, effort and time on going to Mars seems stupid to me; we should invest that energy in saving our planet. As a philosopher, I’m an optimist. Our perception, our values, can change in two or five years. Opportunities for change are everywhere. I want to explore what they are. Source: Kohei Saito, philosopher: ‘Spending so much money, effort and time on going to Mars is stupid’ | Climate | EL PAÍS English
No technology is neutral, and vendors are only ever going to tout the positive qualities. Take this example: it’s a way to create a camera out of any window. Huge benefits, as the article says, but also some rather large (and dystopian) downsides.
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The Holocam technology “uses holographic in-coupling, light guiding and de-coupling elements to redirect the incoming light of a transparent medium to a hidden image sensor.”
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Using an entire pane of glass as a camera lens also opens some fascinating optical possibilities. Some of Zeiss' bullet points include “large aperture invisible camera” and “individual adjustment of orientation and size of the field of views.” Which makes me wonder, what is the maximum aperture and focal range of a camera like this?
Of course, there’s a darker potential for such technology. Given the current fear around hidden cameras in Airbnbs, the idea of every single window (or even shower door) in a rental property being able to spy on you is a little disconcerting. Source: This holographic camera turns any window into an invisible camera | Digital Camera World
An insightful and nuanced post from Stephen Downes, who reflects on various experiences, from changing RSS reader through to the way he takes photographs. What he calls ‘AI drift’ is our tendency to replace manual processes with automated ones.
What I appreciate is that Downes doesn’t say this is A Bad Thing, but that we should notice and reflect on these things. For example, I’ve found it really useful to use AI with my MSc studies and to understand (and accelerate) some of the client work I’ve been involved with.
This is what I’m calling ‘AI drift’ in humans. It’s this phenomenon whereby you sort of ‘drift’ into new patterns and habits when you’re in an AI environment. It’s not the filter bubble; that’s just one part of it. It’s the influence it has over all our behaviour. One of those patterns, obviously, is that you start relying on the AI more do do things. But also, you stop doing some of the things you used to do - not because the AI is handling it for you, because as in this case it might not be helping at all, but because you just start doing other things.
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AI drift isn’t inherently good, and it isn’t inherently bad. It just is. It’s like that quote often attributed to McLuhan: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Recognizing AI drift is simply recognizing how we’re changing as we use new tools. We then decide whether we like that change or not. In my own case, it comes with some mixed feelings. But that’s OK. I wouldn’t expect anything else. Source: AI Drift | Half an Hour
Another fantastic article by Arthur C. Brooks for The Atlantic which draws on research about how your future is likely to be happier than your past. That’s because of various psychological effects that come into play as you age.
Good news! I’m particularly looking forward to my anxiety tamping down and not being as triggered by negative situations.
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A 2013 review of research reveals that older people develop at least three distinct emotional skills: They react less to negative situations, they are better at ignoring irrelevant negative stimuli than they were when younger, and they remember more positive than negative information. This is almost like a superpower many older people have, that they know negative emotions won’t last so they get a head start on feeling good by consciously disregarding bad feelings as they arise.
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If you follow the typical development, you can expect to be nicer and kinder, and less depressed and anxious, when you are old.
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The good news about aging is that if we simply leave things to the passage of time, life will probably get better for us. But we can do more than just wait around to get old. We can lean into the natural improvements and manage any trends we don’t like. Source: How to Be Happy Growing Older | The Atlantic
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I always enjoy posts like this because I invariably learn something new. There’s some gems in here, some I hadn’t come across before, and some I had.
There are plenty of logical fallacies and cognitive biases amongst the ideas, which reminds me of this from Buster Benson. I’ve had a large poster of the linked image on the wall of my home office and it was always something people commented on.
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Fact-Check Scarcity Principle: This article is called 100 Little Ideas but there are fewer than 100 ideas. 99% of readers won’t notice because they’re not checking, and most of those who notice won’t say anything. Don’t believe everything you read.
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Emotional Competence: The ability to recognize others’ emotions and respond to them productively. Harder and rarer than it sounds. Source: 100 Little Ideas | Collab Fund Image: DALL-E 3
Realistically, I’m never going to watch an hour-long YouTube video which is mainly a talking head. I mean, I’m into history, but I’m not that into it.
Thankfully, Open Culture has summarised some of the most important points. If you’re the kind of person who watches a lot of YouTube, then maybe you want to add this to your queue?
The gastrointestinal distress posed by the “native biome” of medieval European food and drink is one thing; the threat of robbery or worse by its roving packs of outlaws is quite another. “Crime is rampant” where you’re going, so “carry a dagger” and “learn how to use it.” In societies of the Middle Ages, people could only protect themselves by being “enmeshed in social webs with each other. No one was an individual.” And so, as a traveler, you must — to put it in Dungeons-and-Dragons terms — belong to some legible class. Though you’ll have no choice but to present yourself as having come from a distant land, you can feel free to pick one of two guises that will suit your obvious foreignness: “you’re either a merchant or a pilgrim.” Source: Advice for Time Traveling to Medieval Europe: How to Staying Healthy & Safe, and Avoiding Charges of Witchcraft | Open Culture
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I’m reading Roots at the moment, the novel by Alex Haley about an African man captured and sold into slavery. I’m at the point of the story where his daughter’s ‘massa’ gets spooked about a slave uprising.
It’s difficult not to draw parallels when reading about an apparent trend towards billionaires building luxury ‘bunkers’ with supplies and blast-proof doors. They would do well to worry, given the amount of inequality in the world.
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Anything that Anil Dash writes is worth reading and this, his first article for Rolling Stone, is no different. I haven’t quoted it here, but I love the first paragraph. What goes around, comes around, eh?
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We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before. And while some of the drivers of this change have been hyped up, or even over-hyped, a few of the most important changes haven’t gotten any discussion at all.
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I’m not a pollyanna about the fact that there are still going to be lots of horrible things on the internet, and that too many of the tycoons who rule the tech industry are trying to make the bad things worse. (After all, look what the last wild era online lead to.) There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird. Source: The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again | Rolling Stone
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This is some incredible writing from psychotherapist Adam Phillips. It’s an edited extract from his forthcoming book On Giving Up and is based on the subtle difference between ‘giving up’ something and… just giving up.
It’s a really important read, at least for me, and particularly poignant at the start of the year. The fact that he talks about Montaigne (one of my favourite authors) and Marion Milner’s demarcation of different forms of attention makes this a highly recommended read. It’s long, but worth it.
I’ve almost picked at random a section to quote here because it’s all fantastic.
All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, is about sacrifice, about what we should give up to get the lives we should want. For our health, for our planet, for our emotional and moral wellbeing – and, indeed, for the profits of the rich – we are asked to give up a great deal now. But alongside this orgy of improving self-sacrifices – or perhaps underlying it – there is a despair and terror of just wanting to give up. A need to keep at bay the sense that life may not be worth the struggle, the struggle that religions and therapies and education, and entertainment, and commodities, and the arts in general are there to help us with. For more and more people now it seems that it is their hatred and their prejudice and their scapegoating that actually keeps them going. As though we are tempted more than ever by what Nietzsche once called “a will to nothingness, a counter-willan aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life”.
The abiding disillusionment with politics and personal relationships, the demand for and the fear of free speech, the dread and the longing for consensus and the coerced consensus of the various fundamentalisms has created a cultural climate of intimidation and righteous indignation. It is as if our ambivalence about our aliveness – about the feeling alive that, however fleeting, sustains us – has become an unbearable tension and needs to be resolved. So even though we cannot, as yet, imagine or describe our lives without the idea of sacrifice, and its secret sharer, compromise, the whole notion of what we want and can get through sacrifice is less clear; both what we think we want and what we are as yet unaware of wanting. The formulating of personal and political ideals has become either too assured or too precarious. And the whole notion of sacrifice depends upon our knowing what we want. Source: What we talk about when we talk about giving up | The Guardian
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A belated Happy New Year, and what better way to start off 2024 than by this reminder that quite a lot of what’s holding us back in the world is political will and societal coordination.
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We actually have a cure for blood cancer now, by the way. Like, we’ve done it. It’s likely that a similar form of immunotherapy will generalize to most forms of cancer. Unfortunately, the only approved gene therapy we have is for sickle-cell disease and costs $2 million per patient, so most people in America simply assume they will never be able to afford any of these treatments, even if they were dying of cancer, because insurance will never cover it. This is actually really bad, because if nobody can afford the treatment, then biotech companies won’t bother investing into it, because it’s not profitable! We have built a society that can’t properly incentivize CURING CANCER. This is despite the fact that socialized healthcare is a proven effective strategy (as long as the government doesn’t sabotage it). We could fix this, we just don’t.
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It’s January 1st of the new year, and with all these people wishing each other a “better year”, I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something. Society getting worse is not something you are hallucinating. It cannot be fixed by you biking to work, or winning the lottery. We are running on the fumes of our wild technological progress of the past 100 years, and our inability to build social systems that can cooperate will destroy civilization as we know it, unless we do something about it. Source: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don’t | Erik McClure
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Arthur C. Brooks, whose writing I always enjoy, writes on sociopaths, narcissists, and ‘Dark Triad’ personalities. These Dark Triads are characterised by narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. They’re manipulative and harmful, and making up about 7% of the population — although interestingly significantly more of the male prison population.
Brooks talks about how to spot and avoid them in the workplace and on social media, and how to gravitate towards ‘Light Triad’ personalities instead. These embody positive traits like faith in humanity and humanism, and represent a more uplifting aspect of human nature. Thankfully, Light Triads are more common in the general population.
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The traits to look for are self-importance, a sense of entitlement, vanity, a victim mentality, a tendency to bend the truth or even openly lie, manipulativeness, grandiosity, a lack of remorse, and an absence of empathy. Probe for these characteristics particularly when on first dates and in job interviews. You might even want to take that test imaginatively on behalf of someone you suspect may have Triad traits and see what result you get. Source: The Sociopaths Among Us—And How to Avoid Them | The Atlantic
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As a Xennial, I have all of the guilt for not working hard enough — along with a desire to live a life more fulfilling and holistic than my parents. Generations below, including Gen Z and then of course my kids, think that working all of the hours is a bit crazy.
This article is about a viral TikTok video of a Gen Z ‘girl’ (although surely ‘young woman’?) crying because the 9-5 grind is “crazy… How do you have friends? How do you have time for dating? I don’t have time for anything, I’m so stressed out.”
It’s easy, as with so many things, for older generations to inflict on generations coming after them the crap that they themselves have had to deal with. But it doesn’t have to be this way. As the article says, the 9-5 job is a relatively recent invention and I, for one, don’t follow that convention.
But then the tide began to turn. People started to point out that “Gen Z girl” was right, actually. Work sucks! No one has any time for anything! Within days, she had become the figurehead for an increasingly common sentiment: We don’t want our lives to revolve around work anymore.
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It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say young people have been gaslit by older generations when it comes to work. As wages stagnate and costs rise, the generation that got free university education and cheap housing have somehow convinced young people that if we’re sad and stressed then it’s simply a problem with our work ethic. We’re too sensitive, entitled, or demanding to hold down a “real job”, the story goes, when really most of us just want a decent night’s sleep and less debt.
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It’s always worth reminding ourselves that the 9-5 shift is itself a relatively recent invention, not some sort of eternal truth, and hopefully soon we’ll see it as a relic from a bygone age. “It was set up to support our patriarchal society – men went to work and women stayed at home to cook and look after the family,” says Emma Last, founder of the workplace wellbeing programme Progressive Minds. “Things have obviously changed a lot since then, and we’re trying to find the balance between cooking meals, looking after ourselves, spending time with family and friends, and having relationships. Isn’t it a good thing that Gen Z are questioning it all?” Source: Nobody Wants Their Job to Rule Their Lives Anymore | VICE
Lorraine Daston highlights the lack of a systematic approach to knowledge (epistemology) in the humanities, unlike in the sciences. This gap affects the perception and value of the humanities in education and society. Daston suggests the emerging field of the history of the humanities could lead to exploring this area, stressing the importance of developing an epistemology of the humanities to validate its methods and significance.
Sadly, it’s this perceived lack of ‘rigour’ which means that humanities departments, whose alumni are needed more than ever in the world of technology, tend to be cut and defunded compared to more ‘scientific’ faculty areas.
I’m not so sure we really know how we know what we know. And even if we did, a great number of intelligent, well-educated people, our ideal readers and potential students, even our colleagues in other departments, wonder why what we teach and write counts as knowledge. The first step in justifying our ways of knowing to these doubters would be to justify them to ourselves. Source: How We Know What We Know | In the Moment
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I’m currently studying towards an MSc in Systems Thinking and earlier this week created a GPT to help me. I fed in all of the course materials, being careful to check the box saying that OpenAI couldn’t use it to improve their models.
It’s not perfect, but it’s really useful. Given the extra context, ChatGPT can not only help me understand key concepts on the course, but help relate them more closely to the overall context.
This example would have been really useful on the MA in Modern History I studied for 20 years ago. Back then, I was in the archives with primary sources such as minutes from the meetings of Victorians discussing educational policy, and reading reports. Being able to have an LLM do everything from explain things in more detail, to guess illegible words, to (as below) creating charts from data would have been super useful.
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The job of historians and other professional researchers and writers, it seems to me, is not to assume the worst, but to work to demonstrate clear pathways for more constructive uses of these tools. For this reason, it’s also important to be clear about the limitations of AI — and to understand that these limits are, in many cases, actually a good thing, because they allow us to adapt to the coming changes incrementally. Warner faults his custom model for outputting a version of his newspaper column filled with cliché and schmaltz. But he never tests whether a custom GPT with more limited aspirations could help writers avoid such pitfalls in their own writing. This is change more on the level of Grammarly than Hal 9000.
In other words: we shouldn’t fault the AI for being unable to write in a way that imitates us perfectly. That’s a good thing! Instead, it can give us critiques, suggest alternative ideas, and help us with research assistant-like tasks. Again, it’s about augmenting, not replacing. Source: How to use generative AI for historical research | Res Obscura
Historically, the way we fought back against oppressive employers and repressive regimes was to band together into unions. The collective bargaining power would help improve conditions and pay.
These days, in a world of the gig economy and hyper-individualism, that kind of collectivisation is on the wane. Enter remote workers deciding to take matters into their own hands, working multiple full-time jobs and being rewarded handsomely.
It’s interesting to notice that it seems to be very much a male, tech worker thing though. Of course, given that this was at the top of Hacker News, it will be used as an excuse to even more closely monitor the 99% of remote workers who aren’t doing this.
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The OE hustlers have some tried-and-true hacks. Taking on a second or third full-time job? Given how time-consuming the onboarding process can be, you should take a week or two of vacation from your other jobs. It helps if you can stagger your jobs by time zone — perhaps one that operates during New York hours, say, and another on California time. Keep separate work calendars for each job — but to avoid double-bookings, be sure to block off all your calendars as soon as a new meeting gets scheduled. And don’t skimp on the tech that will make your life a bit easier. Mouse jigglers create the appearance that you’re online when you’re busy tending to your other jobs. A KVM switch helps you control multiple laptops from the same keyboard.
Some OE hustlers brag about shirking their responsibilities. For them, being overemployed is all about putting one over on their employers. But most in the community take pride in doing their jobs, and doing them well. That, after all, is the single best way to avoid detection: Don’t give your bosses — any of them — a reason to become suspicious.
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The consequences for getting caught actually appear to be fairly low. Matthew Berman, an employment attorney who has emerged as the unofficial go-to lawyer in the OE community, hasn’t encountered anyone who has been hit with a lawsuit for holding a second job. “Most of the time, it’s not going to be worth suing an employee,” he says. But many say the stress of the OE life can get to you. George, the software engineer, has trouble sleeping at night because of his fear of getting caught. Others acknowledge that the rigors of juggling multiple jobs have hurt their marriages. One channel on the OE Discord is dedicated to discussions of family life, mostly among dads with young kids. People in the channel sometimes ask for relationship advice, and the responses they get from the other dads are sweet. “Your regard for your partner,” one person advised of marriage, “should outweigh your desire for validation." Source: ‘Overemployed’ Workers Secretly Juggle Several Jobs for Big Salaries | Business Insider
We get articles like this because we live in a world inescapably tied to neoliberalism and hierarchical ways of organising work. I’m sure the advice to “not make friends at work” is stellar survival advice in a large company, but it’s not the best way to ensure human flourishing.
I’ve definitely been burned by relationships at work, especially earlier in my career when managers use the ‘family’ metaphor. Thankfully, there’s a better way: own your own business with your friends! Then you can bring your full self to work, which is much like having your cake and eating it, too.
At work, this relationship becomes very, very complex. Instead of being a true friendship, what ends up happening is that the socio-economic realities of your workplace come into play—and most often that poisons the well. When money is involved, it clouds any potential friendship. It makes the lines so blurry between real and contrived friendships that the waters become too murky to make clear and meaningful relationships. Is that a real friend, or do they want something from me that benefits them? Who can you really trust at work and what happens if they violate your trust? Is my boss really my friend or are they just trying to get me to work harder/longer/faster?
If, instead, we keep clear boundaries at work, we never fall into the trap of worrying about whom to trust and who has our best interest in mind. It prevents us from transferring our best interests to anyone else simply because we assume they are our friends. Why give that amazing power to someone else at work only to be disappointed?
Worse yet, people will often confuse co-workers with family, falling into the trap of having a “work mom,” “work dad,” or even a “work husband” or “work wife.” This can lead to a number of disastrous results that are well-documented, as family is not the same as work, and confusing the two has long-lasting ramifications that can stifle career success and lead to unethical behaviour. Keeping boundaries clear and your work life separate from your private life will help to alleviate this potential downfall and keep you focused on what really matters: the work. Source: Why You Shouldn’t Make Friends at Work | Psychology Today Canada
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Wise words from Seth Godin. It’s a twist on the advice to stop doing things that maybe used to work but don’t any more. The ‘glitch’ he’s talking about here isn’t just in terms of what might not be working for you or your organisation, but for society and humanity as a whole.
Processionary caterpillars follow the one in front until their destination, even if they’re arranged in a circle, leading them to march until exhaustion.
It might be that you have built a system for your success that works much of the time, but there’s a glitch in it that lets you down. Or it might be that we live in a culture that creates wealth and possibility, but glitches when it fails to provide opportunity to others or leaves a mess in our front yards. Source: Finding the glitch | Seth’s Blog
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This article by Noah Smith gave me pause for thought. There’s plenty of people talking about ‘degrowth’ at the moment and, I have to say, that I don’t know enough to have an opinion.
It’s really easy to get swept up in what other people who broadly share your outlook on life are sharing and discussing. While I definitely agree that ‘growth at all costs’ is problematic, and that ‘green growth’ is probably a sticking plaster, I’m not sure that ‘degrowth’ (as far as I understand it) is the answer?
Perhaps I need to do more reading. If it’s trying to measure things differently rather than just using GDP, then I’ve already written that I’m in favour. But just like calls to ‘abolish the police’ I’m not sure I can go fully along with that. Sorry.
So while I think we do need to worry about the potential negative consequences of growth and try our best to ameliorate those harms, I think trying to impoverish ourselves to save the environment would be a catastrophic mistake, for both us and for the environment. This is not something any progressive ought to fight for. Source: Yes, it’s possible to imagine progressive dystopias | Noahpinion
Benedict Evans, whose post about leaving Twitter I featured last week, has written about AI tools such as ChatGPT from a product point of view.
He makes quite a few good points, not least that if you need ‘cheat sheets’ and guides on how to prompt LLMs effectively, then they’re not “natural language”.
LLMs solve this, theoretically, because, theoretically, you can now not just ask anything but get an answer to anything.
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This is understandably intoxicating, but I think it brings us to two new problems - a science problem and a product problem. You can ask anything and the system will try to answer, but it might be wrong; and, even if it answers correctly, an answer might not be the right way to achieve your aim. That might be the bigger problem.
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Right now, ChatGPT is very useful for writing code, brainstorming marketing ideas, producing rough drafts of text, and a few other things, but for a lot of other people it looks a bit like those PCs ads of the late 1970s that promised you could use it to organise recipes or balance your cheque book - it can do anything, but what? Source: Unbundling AI | Benedict Evans
I discovered this article published at The Cut while browsing Hacker News. I was immediately drawn to it, because one of the main examples it uses is ‘cosplaying’ adulthood while at kids' sporting events.
There’s a few things to say about this, in my experience. The first is that status tends to be conferred by how good your kid is, no matter what your personality. Over and above that, personal traits — such as how funny you are — make a difference, as does how committed and logistically organised you are. And if you can’t manage that, you can always display appropriate wealth (sports kit, the car you drive). Crack all of this, and congrats! You’ve performed adulthood well.
I’m only being slightly facetious. The reason I can crack a wry smile is because it’s true, but also I don’t care that much because I’ve been through therapy. Knowing that it’s all a performance is very different to acting like any of it is important.
The places I most reliably feel this way include: my kids’ sporting events (the other parents all seem to know each other, and they have such good sideline setups, whereas I am always sitting cross-legged on the ground absentmindedly offering my children water out of an old Sodastream bottle and toting their gear in a filthy, too-small canvas tote), parent-teacher meetings, and picking up my kids from their friends’ suburban houses with finished basements.
I’ve always assumed this was a problem unique to people who came from unconventional families, who never learned the finer points of blending in. But I’m beginning to wonder if everyone feels this way and that “the straight world,” or adulthood, as we call it nowadays, is in fact a total mirage. If we’re all cosplaying adulthood, who and where are the real adults? Source: Adulthood Is a Mirage | The Cut
It was only this year that I first heard about nodules, rock-shaped objects formed over millions of years on the sea bed which contain rare earth minerals. We use these for making batteries and other technologies which may help us transition away from fossil fuels.
However, deep-sea mining is, understandably, a controversial topic. At a recent summit of the Pacific Islands Forum, The Cook Islands' Prime Minister outlined his support for exploration and highlighted its potential by gifting seabed nodules to fellow leaders.
This, of course, is a problem caused by capitalism, and the view that the natural world is a resource to be exploited by humans. We’re talking about something which is by definition a non-renewable resource. I think we need to tread (and dive) extremely carefully.
Deep-sea mining advocates say they could be the answer to global demand for minerals to make batteries and transform economies away from fossil fuels. The prime minister of the Cook Islands, Mark Brown, is offering nodules as mementos to fellow leaders from the Pacific Islands Forum (Pif), a bloc of 16 countries and two territories that wraps up its most important annual political meeting on Friday.
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“Forty years of ocean survey work suggests as much as 6.7bn tonnes of mineral-rich manganese nodules, found at a depth of 5,000m, are spread over some 750,000 square kilometres of the Cook Islands continental shelf,” [the Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority] says. Source: Here be nodules: will deep-sea mineral riches divide the Pacific family? | Deep-sea mining | The Guardian
Nature reports that, at the Kalambo Falls archaeological site in Zambia, researchers have unearthed the earliest known examples of woodworking — dating back at least 476,000 years. This is a significant find as it includes two logs interlocked by a hand-cut notch, a method previously unseen in early human history. The discovery also features four other wood tools: a wedge, digging stick, cut log, and a notched branch. These artifacts demonstrate early humans' advanced skills in shaping wood for various purposes, challenging the traditional view that early hominins primarily used stone tools.
I’ve also never heard of the approach that the team used: luminescence dating. This is a method that helps determine when the wood was last exposed to light, and various wood analysis techniques.
The findings, especially the interlocked logs, suggest that early humans had the capability to construct large structures and manipulate wood in complex ways. It’s a groundbreaking discovery, as it not only pushes back the timeline of woodworking in Africa but also sheds new light on the cognitive abilities and technological diversity of our early ancestors. Amazing.
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Sixteen samples for dating were collected at Site BLB by hammering opaque plastic tubes into the sediment. A combination of field gamma spectrometry, laboratory alpha and beta counting and geochemical analyses were used to determine radionuclide content, and the dose rate and age calculator42 was used to calculate radiation dose rate. Sand-sized grains (approximately 150 to 250 µm in diameter) of quartz and potassium-rich feldspar were isolated under red-light conditions for luminescence measurements and measured on Risø TL/OSL instruments using single-aliquot regenerative dose protocols. Single-grain quartz OSL measurements dated sediments younger than around 60 kyr, but beyond this age the OSL signal was saturated. pIR IRSL measurements of aliquots consisting of around 50 grains of potassium-rich feldspars were able to provide ages for all samples collected. The pIR IRSL signal yielded an average value for anomalous fading of 1.46 ± 0.50% per decade. Where quartz OSL and feldspar pIR IRSL were applied to the same samples, the ages were consistent within uncertainties without needing to correct for anomalous fading. The conservative approach taken here has been to use ages without any correction for fading. If a fading correction had been applied then the ages for the wooden artefacts would be older. Source: Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago | Nature
I haven’t seen puffins in real life very often, but they’re associated with the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland, my home county. They’re a bird associated with more northern climes, and are enigmatic creatures.
It’s both sad and heartening to see that, to save them going extinct in Iceland, locals have to stop them wandering towards the bright lights of human civilization. Instead, they take the baby puffins, which are adorably called ‘pufflings’, and throw them off cliffs to encourage them to fly.
Natural evolution can’t happen as fast as humans are changing the world, so unless we want to see the absolute devastation of biodiversity on our planet, traditions such as this are going to have to become commonplace.
This yearly tradition is what’s known as “puffling season” and the practice is a crucial, life-saving endeavor.
The chicks of Atlantic puffins, or pufflings, hatch in burrows on high sea cliffs. When they’re ready to fledge, they fly from their colony and spend several years at sea until they return to land to breed, according to Audubon Project Puffin.
Pufflings have historically found the ocean by following the light of the moon, digital creator Kyana Sue Powers told NPR over a video call from Iceland. Now, city lights lead the birds astray.
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Many residents of Vestmannaeyjar spend a few weeks in August and September collecting wayward pufflings that have crashed into town after mistaking human lights for the moon. Releasing the fledglings at the cliffs the following day sets them on the correct path.
This human tradition has become vital to the survival of puffins, Rodrigo A. Martínez Catalán of Náttúrustofa Suðurlands [South Iceland Nature Research Center] told NPR. A pair of puffins – which mate for life – only incubate one egg per season and don’t lay eggs every year.
“If you have one failed generation after another after another after another,” Catalán said, “the population is through, pretty much." Source: During puffling season, Icelanders save baby puffins by throwing them off cliffs | NPR
The big technology news this past week has been OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, announcing the availability of GPTs. Confusing naming aside, this introduces the idea of anyone being able to build ‘agents’ to help them with tasks.
Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is somewhat of an authority in this area. He’s posted on what this means in practice, and gives some examples.
Mollick has a book coming out next April, called Co-Intelligence which I’m looking to reading. For now, I’d recommend adding his newsletter to those that you read about AI (along with Helen Beetham’s, of course).
[…]
So GPTs are easy to make and very powerful, though they are not flawless. But they also have two other features that make them useful. First, you can publish or share them with the world, or your organization (which addresses my previous calls for building organizational prompt libraries, which I call grimoires) and potentially sell them in a future App Store that OpenAI has announced. The second thing is that the GPT starts seemlessly from its hidden prompt, so working with them is much more seamless than pasting text right into the chat window. We now have a system for creating GPTs that can be shared with the world.
[…]
In their reveal of GPTs, OpenAI clearly indicated that this was just the start. Using that action button you saw above, GPTs can be easily integrated into with other systems, such as your email, a travel site, or corporate payment software. You can start to see the birth of true agents as a result. It is easy to design GPTs that can, for example, handle expense reports. It would have permission to look through all your credit card data and emails for likely expenses, write up a report in the right format, submit it to the appropriate authorities, and monitor your bank account to ensure payment. And you can imagine even more ambitious autonomous agents that are given a goal (make me as much money as you can) and carry that out in whatever way they see fit.
You can start to see both near-term and farther risks in this approach. In the immediate future, AIs will become connected to more systems, and this can be a problem because AIs are incredibly gullible. A fast-talking “hacker” (if that is the right word) can convince a customer service agent to give a discount because the hacker has “super-duper-secret government clearance, and the AI has to obey the government, and the hacker can’t show the clearance because that would be disobeying the government, but the AI trusts him right…” And, of course, as these agents begin to truly act on their own, even more questions of responsibility and autonomous action start to arise. We will need to keep a close eye on the development of agents to understand the risks, and benefits, of these systems. Source: Almost an Agent: What GPTs can do | Ethan Mollick
As I’ve mentioned sporadically for over a decade, I have a cold shower every morning. Not only is it good for mental health, but it’s a way of adding a small bit of suffering into my life.
That might sound like an odd thing to do, but study after study shows that it’s the difference between our experiences that provide pleasure or pain. Humans can adapt to anything, and I believe my days are better by starting them off with a small amount of suffering.
This post riffs on that idea, and as someone who’s no stranger to wild camping in the snow, I can definitely attest to daily cold showers being more effective than one-off trips for building resilience!
Image: Unsplash
I’d like to share two ‘leaving Twitter’ posts I came across yesterday. Theyoccupy somewhat opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of reasons for the decision. One is cold and rational, as befits an analyst like Benedict Evans. The other is more passionate and emotional, as you’d expect from someone like Douglas Rushkoff.
Let’s take Evans first, who writes:
There are various diagnoses for this. Tesla has sometimes been run in chaos as well, but the pain of that is on the employees, not the customers: you can’t wake up in the middle of the night and decide the car should have five wheels and ship that the next day, but you can make those kinds of decisions in software, and Elon Musk does, all the time. Perhaps it’s a fundamental failure to understand how you run a community. Or something else. But whatever the explanation, Twitter now feels like the Brewster’s Millions of tech - ‘Watch One Man Turn $40bn Into $4 In 24 Months!’ I couldn’t really care less about Twitter’s business model, although I did see the writing on the wall in 2014 when I wrote about what I call ‘software with shareholders’. So poor platform decisions don’t really move me.
What I am concerned about is reputational damage. Which is why our co-op’s Twitter/X account has been mothballed and will be deleted in January 2024. Being associated with a toxic brand is never a good idea.
So let’s move onto Rushkoff, who starts writing about Twitter/X but ends up (perhaps unhelpfully) generalising:
[…]
That frictionless quality of this space untethers its users from reality. It’s like an acid trip where the hallucinations can become more compelling than the real. Every thought spins out and magnifies. If you have a fear, it’s as if it is just conjured into reality. Without an intentional set and setting for such an acid trip, one can easily get lost in the turbulence. I think Rushkoff makes a great point about “ideas in progress”. It used to be the case, before everyone arrived on social media, that you could share things that were unfinished, works in progress, half-baked ideas. These days, people are held to account for things they’ve posted over a decade earlier, as if people don’t learn and grow.
I’m pleased to have made the decision a couple of years ago to leave Twitter complete, and to have done so without much fanfare. There are much better spaces to be online, usually in the dark forests. But there are more public places, too. The Fediverse (where you can find me on social.coop, among other spaces) continues to be a good experience for me. More recently, I’ve found Substack Notes to be pretty great.
People used to describe Twitter like a café or bar where you could get involved with, and overhear, great conversations. To extend that analogy, sometimes a bar gets overrun with the wrong kind of person, and so people with any kind of taste move on. It seems like that’s what’s happened now with Twitter.
Sources:
While there’s nothing particularly new in this post by Bill Gates, it’s nevertheless a good one to send to people who might be interested in the impact that AI is about to have on society.
Gates compares AI agents to Clippy which, he says, was merely a bot. After going through all of the advantages there will be to AI agents acting on your behalf, Gates does, to his credit, talk about privacy implications. He also touches on social conventions and how human norms interact with machine efficiency.
The thing that strikes me in all of this is something that Audrey Watters discussed a few months ago in relation to fitness technologies: will these technologies make us more like to live ‘templated lives’. In other words, are they helping support human flourishing, or nudging us towards lives that make more revenue for advertisers, etc.?
[…]
How will you interact with your agent? Companies are exploring various options including apps, glasses, pendants, pins, and even holograms. All of these are possibilities, but I think the first big breakthrough in human-agent interaction will be earbuds. If your agent needs to check in with you, it will speak to you or show up on your phone. (“Your flight is delayed. Do you want to wait, or can I help rebook it?”) If you want, it will monitor sound coming into your ear and enhance it by blocking out background noise, amplifying speech that’s hard to hear, or making it easier to understand someone who’s speaking with a heavy accent.
[…]
But who owns the data you share with your agent, and how do you ensure that it’s being used appropriately? No one wants to start getting ads related to something they told their therapist agent. Can law enforcement use your agent as evidence against you? When will your agent refuse to do something that could be harmful to you or someone else? Who picks the values that are built into agents?
[…]
But other issues won’t be decided by companies and governments. For example, agents could affect how we interact with friends and family. Today, you can show someone that you care about them by remembering details about their life—say, their birthday. But when they know your agent likely reminded you about it and took care of sending flowers, will it be as meaningful for them? Source: AI is about to completely change how you use computers | Bill Gates
These days, I lean heavily on Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter to know what’s going on in the areas of social media I don’t pay much attention to. In other words, TikTok, Instagram, and… well, most of it.
However, as Broderick himself points out, nobody really knows what’s going on, and there is no centre, due to the fragmentation of the (social) web. This used to be called ‘balkanization’ but because the 1990s is a long time ago, Broderick has coined the term ‘the Vapor Web’. He claims we’re in a ‘post-viral’ time.
I don’t think ‘The Vapor Web’ will catch on as a term, though. At least not amongst British people and Canadians. We like our ‘u’ too much ;)
Unlike previous global conflicts, however, this time around, the defining narrative about online behavior is not just that there is, seemingly, an absence of it, but that it also still, partially, works the way it did 10 years ago. Every millennial is experiencing an overwhelming feeling that, as WIRED recently wrote, “first-gen social media users have nowhere to go,” but that’s not actually true. It’s just that TikTok is where everyone is and TikTok doesn’t work like Facebook or even YouTube. Which is why the White House is agonizing over the popularity of TikTok hashtags right now instead of canceling my student loan debt.
[…]
Let’s do one more, to bring us back to Israel and Palestine. In the last 120 days, the #Israel hashtag has been used around 220,000 times and been viewed three billion times. The #Palestine hashtag has been used 230,000 times and has been viewed around two billion times. Yes, Palestine is slightly more popular on TikTok, but nothing out of line with what outlets like NPR have found by, you know, actually polling Americans along political and generational lines. To say nothing of how minuscule these numbers are when compared to how large TikTok is.
Which is to say that the internet doesn’t make sense in aggregate anymore and trying to view it as a monolith only gives you bad, confusing, and, oftentimes, wrong impressions of what’s actually going on.
The best descriptions of the current state of the web right now were both actually published months before the fighting in the Middle East broke out and written about a completely different topic. Semafor’s Max Tani coined the term, “the fragmentation election,” which was a riff on writer John Herrman’s similar idea, the “nowhere election”. Tani points to declining media institutions and dying platforms as the culprit for all the amorphousness online. And Herrman latches on podcasts and indie media. Both are true, but I think those are all just symptoms. And so, to piggyback off both of them, and go a bit broader (as I typically do), I’m going to call our current moment the Vapor Web. Because there is actually more internet with more happening on it — and with bigger geopolitical stakes — than ever before. And yet, it’s nearly impossible to grab ahold of it because none of it adds up into anything coherent. Simply put, we’re post-viral now. Source: Is the web actually evaporating? | Garbage Day
Image: DALL-E 3
It’s one thing user-generated content being circulated around social media for the purposes of disinformation. It’s another thing entirely when Adobe’s stock image marketplace is selling AI-generated ‘photos’ of destroyed buildings in Gaza.
This article in VICE includes a comment from an Adobe spokesperson who references the Content Authenticity Initiative. But this just puts the problem on the user rather than the marketplace. People looking to download AI-generated images to spread disinformation, don’t care about the CAI, and will actively look for ways to circumvent it.
As first reported by Australian news outlet Crikey, the photo is labeled “conflict between Israel and palestine generative ai” and shows a cloud of dust swirling from the tops of a cityscape. It’s remarkably similar to actual photographs of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, but it isn’t real. Despite being an AI-generated image, it ended up on a few small blogs and websites without being clearly labeled as AI.
[…]
As numerous experts have pointed out, the collapse of social media and the proliferation of propaganda has made it hard to tell what’s actually going on in conflict zones. AI-generated images have only muddied the waters, including over the last several weeks, as both sides have used AI-generated imagery for propaganda purposes. Further compounding the issue is that many publicly-available AI generators are launched with few guardrails, and the companies that build them don’t seem to care. Source: Adobe Is Selling AI-Generated Images of Violence in Gaza and Israel | VICE
I’ll turn 43 next month. I seem to have a lot more grey hair than other people my age. Some people act towards me as if I’m old. Perhaps I am in their eyes.
Fair enough, some days I wake up and I feel a million years old, but most of the time my fitness regime means that I feel pretty awesome.
This article is about ignoring the ‘societal side-eye’ and doing badass things anyway. It’s something we all need to remember as we age: don’t be beholden to other people’s expectation of what’s appropriate.
Who says we’re not supposed to even countenance the idea of learning to in-line skate. Or skateboard. Or paraglide. Or try trapeze work. Or aerial silks. Or whatever it was that got away from us as youths, and now beckons us back if we would only put in the training time. When does a timeline run out?
If we do such things, particularly if we sport grey hair, we are subjected to
“OH ISN’T THAT SO CUUUUUUUUUTE!”
[…]
Humans are a judgmental lot. We love to make fun of, mock and ridicule, especially those who are doing things we don’t have the guts to try. When some tiny Black woman well over a hundred heads out onto the track and runs a record time, we call her sweet or cute while she is engaging in serious badassery.
[…]
It’s hard enough to age. It’s far harder to age in a ageist society which is eager to denounce and mock those of us who defy expectations and insist on writing our own history, full of whatever badassery fills our hearts. Source: You’re Too Old to Care About the Societal Side Eye When You Want to Be a Badass | Too Old for This Sh*t
I don’t think much of the poem, but I’m stealing the first line of this article as the title of this post. It’s a useful metaphor!
Image: Unsplash
Despite the great work being done around Open Recognition, the main use case for digital credentials remains helping people get jobs. Which means that I’ve spent over a decade, on and off, being forced to think about the interface between people wanting to be hired, and those who want to hire those people.
This article talks about job seekers using AI tools to automate applications. In the example given, the system used sent 5,000 applications on behalf of someone, which landed them 20 interviews. They’d previously got the same number of interviews from manually applying to 200-300 jobs, but it was a lot less work.
Credentials are always a form of arms race if we’re always stacking them vertically like the sheets of paper in the image below. Open Recognition allows us to think about a more wide-ranging set of skills, but it requires people in HR departments to think differently. Sometimes it’s about quality over quantity.
Recruiters are less enamored with the idea of bots besieging their application portals. When Christine Nichlos, CEO of the talent acquisition company People Science, told her recruiting staff about the tools, the news raised a collective groan. She and some others see the use of AI as a sign that a candidate isn’t serious about a job. “It’s like asking out every woman in the bar, regardless of who they are,” says a recruiting manager at a Fortune 500 company who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to speak on behalf of his employer.
Other recruiters are less concerned. “I don’t really care how the résumé gets to me as long as the person is a valid person,” says Emi Dawson, who runs the tech recruiting firm NeedleFinder Recruiting. For years, some candidates have outsourced their applications to inexpensive workers in other countries. She estimates that 95 percent of the applications she gets come from totally unqualified candidates, but she says her applicant tracking software filters most of them out—perhaps the fate of some of the 99.5 percent of Joseph’s LazyApply applications that vanished into the ether. Source: AI bots can do the grunt work of filling out job applications for you | Ars Technica
I need to dig into this BBC R&D report, but it looks fascinating at first glance. I recognise the names of some of the people who were interviewed in the process of creating it, and what’s interesting to me is that they found that instead of the ‘next big thing’ in terms of technology, they found “a complex set of factors that we believe will enable and catalyse one another, sometimes in surprising and unpredictable ways”.
The most important of these, of course, was “accepting and trying to deal with climate as an overriding priority” but also identifying two types of complexity. The first is “a sense that in order to simply go about your day as a person, it’s necessary to interact with, and understand, many complex sources of information”. The second is “a sense that the overarching systems of the world like politics, finance, economics, and healthcare, are becoming more complex and difficult to understand”.
By the end of the project, we’d interviewed twenty-two people from the fields of science, economics, education, technology, design, business leadership, research, activism, journalism, and many points between. We spoke to people from both inside and outside the BBC and around the world. All of these people have a unique view on the future, and our report teases out the common themes from the interviews and compiles their ideas about how things might come to be in the near future.
We grouped the themes we identified into five sections. The first, A complex world, outlines sources of complexity and uncertainty our interviewees see in their worlds. Climate change is by far the largest and most significant of these. The next section, A divided world, also covers big-picture context and outlines some of the social and economic drivers our interviewees see playing out over the next few years. The AI boom and New interactions go into detail on specific technologies and use cases our interviewees think will be significant. Finally, The case for hope bundles up some of the reasons our interviewees see to be hopeful about the future — provided we are willing to act to bring about the changes we’d like to see in the world Source: Projections: Things are not normal | BBC R&D
Craig Mod is a couple of months older than me, as I turn 43 just before Christmas. Like me, he’s gone through some therapy. Unlike me, he lives alone, and has continued therapy sessions for over five years.
What I like about the raw honesty of what he writes in this dispatch is how he wishes that everyone had access to therapy. Despite all of the positive messages about mental health, there’s still something of a stigma about getting some help. As if you should just “get over it”.
But therapy is part of how you become you. As Craig says, in the bit that comes after the part I’ve quoted below: “Therapy is simple. You load up FaceTime and speak out loud the things you’re most terrified about in life. Be radically open and honest, treating yourself as a third party, kindly observant without judgement."
It’s hard talking about your hopes, fears, and dreams with people you are emotionally invested in. There’s something remarkably grown-up and liberating about finally being able to start living a more flourishing life by sorting your shit out.
[…]
I just turned 43 the other day. As part of the fun of embracing mid-life crises, I’m in pattern matching mode. Two decades of watching friends either pair up and start families (or just embark on paired adventures), or continue down paths of aloneness. It seems to get more and more acute — the effects of aloneness — as folks drift into their 40s. It also seems to be more and more difficult to break habits connected with aloneness the older we get. This makes sense. Habits self-reinforce. And the folks with families have less time for solo people, creating even more dissonance.
[…]
I’ve spent the last five and half years speaking weekly with a therapist in New York over FaceTime. I started because I was exhausted. I recognized toxic relationship patterns that I had held onto since my teenage years, and wanted to break free. And I recognized that I had spent roughly twenty years not being able to do that on my own. (I had made some strides, of course, in fits and starts; most notably when I was 27, then: at the lowest of lows, I began running in the middle of the night (2am, feeling like I was losing my mind, put on my shoes, and ran the silent moonlit summer streets of Tokyo until my lungs burned and I felt back on the ground), soon completing two full marathons, felt my sense of value and self-worth rise, charged more for my time, made my way to Palo Alto, worked with incredible talent, made real money, big projects, huge scale, proved to myself I wasn’t stuck — it was an incredible stretch, thinking back on it now, a stretch of life-transformational love and hugs and sense of support, all initially catalyzed by feeling more alone than ever before, a yawning endless aloneness, and wanting to crawl out of that well before someone came and sealed the top.) Back to five years ago — I was 37 and stuck and thought — OK, let’s try something new. Hence: calling in for support (finally!).
I feel guilty for having access to this therapist. I want everyone to have access to someone like this. The world would be whole if you gave everyone a talented therapist and a cat. I can’t overstate how transformational my weekly act of analysis has been. I am still broken in many obvious (and non-unique) ways. But through these weekly sessions I’ve mitigated a huge chunk of lingering aloneness. Source: Tokyo Walk, TBOT Cover, Aloneness | Roden Issue 086
Some wise words from author Warren Ellis, whose Sunday newsletter ‘Orbital Operations’ is well worth subscribing to.
Related: although she hasn’t specifically confirmed it, I get the feeling that Laura is working on a sequel to her novel Maybe Zombies. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend it.
Yes, we are all outwardly lazy bastards — and if you are entering the journey of a creator of stories now, then be advised — you’re allowed to stare at the wall for as long as you damn well like and need to. Those days and weeks of farting around within the walls of your mind are what every piece of art people love come from. Every story you ever adored? Someone sat around like a piece of meat propped on a sofa until it happened. There are no lazy writers. It just takes some of us longer to get off the sofa and put the pen “on the attack against the innocent paper.”
(That line is from Olga Tokarczuk.)
You have permission to dream other lives and whole new worlds for as long as it takes. Source: Orbital Operations, 5 November 2023
There are some people, perhaps most people, who do not expect setbacks and problems in life. They seem to think that it should all be smooth sailing, and that anything that interferes with this unarticulated plan is somehow annoying or unfair.
Perhaps because I spent my teenage years reading philosophy (which I studied at university) and then my adult life reading Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, this isn’t my view. Instead, I’m well aware that everyone has to deal with setbacks and, in fact, they make you stronger and more focused.
This article discusses the results of research based on interventions taking as its basis The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell. He noticed that cultures around the world had foundational stories which were based on a similar structure. The researchers took this approach, updated it for modern life, and used the structure as an intervention to help individuals to tell better stories about their lives.
Our research reveals that the hero’s journey is not just for legends and superheroes. In a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we show that people who frame their own life as a hero’s journey find more meaning in it. This insight led us to develop a “restorying” intervention to enrich individuals’ sense of meaning and well-being. When people start to see their own lives as heroic quests, we discovered, they also report less depression and can cope better with life’s challenges.
[…]
To explore the connection between people’s life stories and the hero’s journey, we first had to simplify the storytelling arc from Campbell’s original formulation, which featured 17 steps. Some of the steps in the original set were very specific, such as undertaking a “magic flight” after completing a quest. Think of Dorothy, in the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, being carried by flying monkeys to the Emerald City after vanquishing the Wicked Witch of the West. Others are out of touch with contemporary culture, such as encountering “women as temptresses.” We abridged and condensed the 17 steps into seven elements that can be found both in legends and everyday life: a lead protagonist, a shift of circumstances, a quest, a challenge, allies, a personal transformation and a resulting legacy.
For example, in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo (the protagonist) leaves the Shire (a shift) to destroy the Ring (a quest). Sam and Gandalf (his allies) help him face Sauron’s forces (a challenge). He discovers unexpected inner strength (a transformation) and then returns home to help the friends he left behind (a legacy). In a parallel way in everyday life, a young woman (the protagonist) might move to Los Angeles (a shift), develop an idea for a new business (a quest), get support from her family and new friends (her allies), overcome self-doubt after initial failure (a challenge), grow into a confident and successful leader (a transformation) and then help her community (a legacy).
[…]
Anyone can frame their life as a hero’s journey—and we suspect that people can also benefit from taking small steps toward a more heroic life. You can see yourself as a heroic protagonist, for example, by identifying your values and keeping them top of mind in daily life. You can lean into friendships and new experiences. You can set goals much like those of classic quests to stay motivated—and challenge yourself to improve your skills. You can also take stock of lessons learned and ways that you might leave a positive legacy for your community or loved ones. Source: To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero | Scientific American
This is an interesting article that, to be honest, I expected a bit more from. It comments on some obvious things such as how problematic a rigid and joyless form of ultra-masculinity can be, as well as being careful not to say that discipline isn’t important.
While I appreciate that the author, Dave Holmes, doesn’t use the term ‘toxic masculinity’ (which I think doesn’t really mean anything any more) what I do think he could have developed further is the very last line. In it, he mentions that the real threat to manhood is us “staying children” which is a much more interesting area to explore.
The world is more individualised, gamified, and commercialised than ever before. Masculinity, as a concept, is therefore an idea to be bought and sold. The version we need to fix the world is not the version that gains the most likes on social media; it’s one that is confident, self-reflective, and biased towards helping others.
[…]
“Men are not men anymore” is ancient; “men are not men anymore, buy this and fix that,” slightly newer. But this is a much bleaker time, a time of “men are not men anymore, smash that subscribe button.” A generation of boys looking for rules has met a generation of creeps looking for an audience: Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, Andrew Tate. Guys who offer a rigid and joyless version of masculinity. Guys whose brand says, “I have learned how to throttle everything that is exuberant and playful within myself to become someone else’s version of what a man is; what’s wrong with you?” Guys who have chosen a car for its color and will never forgive themselves for it.
[…]
This is not to say you should throw away rules, or that playing to a person’s insecurity isn’t sometimes the right move. I quit smoking at 30, cold turkey, unless I was in a bar, or walking home after a good meal, or near someone who asked, “Would you like a cigarette?” My friend Lee picked up on this. “For someone who has quit smoking,” he said, “you are doing a lot of smoking.” I protested, “It’s just hard in certain situations.” Lee looked me in the eye and said, “Have you tried being a man?” Haven’t had a cigarette since.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Lee aren’t saying independent thinking and discipline are virtues for men as opposed to women. They are just virtues. Rules for good living. Like we aim to provide in the Esquire of 2023. It’s time we stop being so worried about becoming women and start focusing on the real threat to manhood: staying children. Source: Can You Still Say ‘Be A Man’? | Esquire
Making the world a happier, fairer, safer place seems like an idea that most people can get behind. But how do you do it? Although there’s a relationship between average self-reported happiness of a population and increased GDP per capita, there are notable outliers.
So, what to do? Focus on other numbers as well. This article talks about measuring ‘Wellbys’ or ‘well-being-life-adjusted-years’ which involves placing a lot more emphasis on subjective numbers.
The trouble, as anyone who has visited a hospital in England will know, is that self-reported data while useful can be very problematic. For example, when I go into hospital, I know that they will ask me to rate my pain on a scale of 1-10. Being a reasonably stoic kind of person, I used to keep that number low, which not only kept me at the back of the line for being seen, but meant they were less likely to give me painkillers.
Guess what I’ve learned to do? Yep, game the system. People respond to incentives, so although trying to make single numbers go up and to the right might make life easier for those intervening in systems, it doesn’t make those interventions any more effective.
Instead, I’d like to see the focus more on something like the Human Development Index (HDI) which, not only has been around for a while, but is a composite of statistics designed to increase human flourishing.
What’s going on here? How do we explain the gaps in life satisfaction that objective metrics like GDP don’t explain?
Nowadays, a growing chorus of experts argues that helping people is ultimately about making them happier — not just wealthier or healthier — and the best way to find out how happy people are is to just ask them directly. This camp says we should focus a lot more on subjective well-being: how happy people are, or how satisfied they are with their lives, based on what they say matters most to them — not just based on objective metrics like GDP. Subjective well-being can tell us things that objective metrics can’t.
[…]
Instead, [Michael} Plant [who leads the Happier Lives Institute] argues we should compare how much good different things do in a single “currency” — specifically, how many well-being-adjusted life years, or Wellbys, they produce. Producing one Wellby means increasing life satisfaction by one point (on the 0-10 life satisfaction scale) for one year. It’s a metric that some economists, including those behind the World Happiness Report, are coming to embrace. If we were to evaluate every policy in terms of how many Wellbys it produces, that would allow for direct apples-to-apples comparisons.
“I’m pretty bullish about just using well-being as the [single] measure,” Plant told me. Source: Make people happier — not just wealthier and healthier | Vox
This article in the MIT Technology Review largely comes to the same conclusions as my comment in another Thought Shrapnel post today. If the web is broken because of tracking, and that tracking comes from advertising funding the web, then we need a better way of funding the web.
Big Tech wants that to be user subscriptions. But there’s a federated network of instances out there called the Fediverse which will, inevitably, be around longer than any particular social network. So you might as well get onboard now.
[…]
In 1999, the ad company DoubleClick was planning to combine personal data with tracking cookies to follow people around the web so it could target its ads more effectively. This changed what people thought was possible. It turned the cookie, originally a neutral technology for storing Web data locally on users’ computers, into something used for tracking individuals across the internet for the purpose of monetizing them.
[…]
Our modern internet is built on highly targeted advertising using our personal data. That is what makes it free. The social platforms, most digital publishers, Google—all run on ad revenue. For the social platforms and Google, their business model is to deliver highly sophisticated targeted ads. (And business is good: in addition to Google’s billions, Meta took in $116 billion in revenue for 2022. Nearly half the people living on planet Earth are monthly active users of a Meta-owned product.) Meanwhile, the sheer extent of the personal data we happily hand over to them in exchange for using their services for free would make people from the year 2000 drop their flip phones in shock.
[…]
When we think of what’s most obviously broken about the internet—harassment and abuse; its role in the rise of political extremism, polarization, and the spread of misinformation; the harmful effects of Instagram on the mental health of teenage girls—the connection to advertising may not seem immediate. And in fact, advertising can sometimes have a mitigating effect: Coca-Cola doesn’t want to run ads next to Nazis, so platforms develop mechanisms to keep them away.
But online advertising demands attention above all else, and it has ultimately enabled and nurtured all the worst of the worst kinds of stuff. Social platforms were incentivized to grow their user base and attract as many eyeballs as possible for as long as possible to serve ever more ads. Or, more accurately, to serve ever more you to advertisers. To accomplish this, the platforms have designed algorithms to keep us scrolling and clicking, the result of which has played into some of humanity’s worst inclinations. Source: How to fix the internet | MIT Technology Review
This article is the standard way of reporting Meta’s announcement that, to comply with a new EU ruling, they will allow users to pay not to be shown adverts. It’s likely that only privacy-minded and better-off people are likely to do so, given the size of the charge.
What isn’t mentioned in this type of article, but which TechCrunch helpfully notes, is that the issue is really about tracking. By introducing a charge, Meta hopes that they can gain legitimate consent for users to be tracked so as to avoid a monthly fee.
X, formerly Twitter, is also trialling a monthly subscription. Of course, if you’re going to pay for your social media, why not set up your own Fediverse instance, or donate to a friendly admin who runs it for you. I do the latter with social.coop.
Anyone over the age of 18 who resides in the European Union (EU), European Economic Area (EEA), or Switzerland will be able to pay a monthly subscription in order to stop seeing ads. Meta states that “while people are subscribed, their information will not be used for ads.”
[…]
Subscribing via the web costs around $10.50 per month, but subscribing on an Android or iOS device pushes the cost up to almost $14 per month. The difference in price is down to the commission Apple and Google charge for in-app payments.
The monthly charge covers all linked accounts in a user’s Accounts Center. However, that only applies until March 1 next year. After that, an extra $6 per month will be payable for each additional account listed in a user’s Accounts Center. That extra charge increases to $8.50 per month on Android and iOS. Source: Meta Introduces Ad-Free Subscription for Facebook, Instagram | PC Magazine
Image: Unsplash
Well, this is absolutely delightful.
The view below is from a window of Hotel Washington looking out over the monument in Washington D.C. but there are others that include just random people’s back gardens.
Egyptology is endlessly fascinating to me. I only got to scratch the surface teaching a course called Medicine Through Time as a History teacher fifteen years ago, but it’s something I’ll perhaps return to in my retirement.
I’m not sure which time period you’d like to go and have a look at (not live in, that’s a different thing entirely) but for me it’s Ancient Egypt. It all seems so other-worldly.
[…]
False doors were a specific type of funerary decoration often found in the tombs of the Egyptian elite during the Old Kingdom, the period more than 4,000 years ago when the Giza pyramids were built. False doors were carved from a single piece of limestone and took the form of a narrow doorway surrounded by inscribed door jambs and surmounted by a lintel. The tomb’s occupant was usually represented seated at a table laden with food offerings: vegetables, fruits, bread, wine, beer, and meats—everything a soul would need to sustain itself in the afterlife. The family members and friends of the deceased could also be immortalized on the false door. These carvings were not portraits, however, but idealized representations. Both men and women were shown in the prime of their life: strong, healthy, vigorous, and fertile.
[…]
In place of stone, they turned to the muddy clay of the Nile, of which there was an abundance. Carefully, they crafted and fired small models of houses complete with courtyards. They filled the courtyards with models of bread and vegetables, grain bins and pots filled with beer. Then they placed these objects, collectively known as soul houses, on top of the graves of their family and friends. The soul houses became imbued with magic and through them, food offerings could pass between the worlds of the living and the worlds of the dead. They are simple objects, but they show that the ordinary ancient Egyptians were every bit as concerned as the social elites with providing for their ancestors in the afterlife.
I’ve only ever driven past Stonehenge, as it’s a long way from where I grew up, and by the time I was old enough to go independently there were all sorts of restrictions around it.
It’s been interesting over my lifetime to see how the understanding of its significance has changed, especially as other henges and monuments have been found nearby.
[…]
“The false association of [Stonehenge] with the Druids has persisted to the present day,” [historian Carole M.] Cusak writes, “and has become a form of folklore or folk-memory that has enabled modern Druids to obtain access and a degree of respect in their interactions with Stonehenge and other megalithic sites.”
Meanwhile, archaeologists continue to explore the centuries of construction at Stonehenge and related sites like Durrington Walls and the Avenue that connects Stonehenge to the River Avon. Neolithic Britons seem to have come together to transform Stonehenge into the ring of giant stones—some from 180 miles away—we know today. Questions about construction and chronology continue, but current archeological thinking is dominated by findings and analyses of the Stonehenge Riverside Project of 2004–2009. The Stonehenge Riverside Project’s surveys and excavations made up the first major archeological explorations of Stonehenge and surroundings since the 1980s. The project archaeologists postulate that Stonehenge was a long-term cemetery for cremated remains, with Durrington Walls serving as the residencies and feasting center for its builders. Source: Stonehenge Before the Druids (Long, Long, Before The Druids) | JSTOR Daily
I’m not sure what’s more fascinating: the scale of the Roman army’s building (in this case, in Syria) or the French Jesuit priest who surveyed them by aeroplane.
Either way, the history geek in me loves this.
Now, anthropologists from Dartmouth have analyzed declassified spy satellite imagery dating from the Cold War, identifying 396 Roman forts, according to a recent paper published in the journal Antiquity. And they have come to a different conclusion about the site distribution: the forts were constructed along trade routes to ensure the safe passage of people and goods.
[…]
The Dartmouth team analyzed CORONA and HEXAGON images covering some 300,000 square kilometers (115,831 square miles) in the northern Fertile Crescent, mapping 4,500 known archaeological sites and other features that seemed to be sites of interest. Some 10,000 previously undiscovered sites were added to their database. Poidebard’s forts have their own category in that database, based on their distinctive square shape and size, and the Dartmouth researchers found many more likely forts lurking in the spy satellite imagery.
The results confirmed Poidebard’s 1934 finding of a line of forts running along the strata Dioceltiana and also revealed several new forts along that route. But the survey also showed many new, previously undetected Roman forts running west-southwest between the Euphrates Valley and western Syria, as well as connecting the Tigris and Khabur rivers. That seems more suggestive of the forts supporting the movement of troops, supplies, or trade goods across the Fertile Crescent—cultural exchange sites rather than barriers. The authors date most of the forts to between the second and sixth centuries CE, after which there was widespread abandonment of the sites, although a few remained occupied into the medieval period. Source: I spy with my Cold War satellite eye… nearly 400 Roman forts in the Middle East | Ars Technica
I haven’t gone enough into Buddhism to understand whether what is described in this article by Richard D. Bartlett constitutes as secular version of it, but from my limited knowledge, it would appear so.
That’s not in any way to downplay the important insights that Rich brings to the fore in his writing. For example, asking the question about group dynamics when some or all of the group drinks strong coffee. Or wondering what the largest group is that can hold a single conversation.
Fascinating stuff, and firmly in the realm of philosophy of conviviality and solidarity. One to return to.
I want you to see how your agency is not a tidy black box contained inside the envelope of your skin, but distributed in a network, intra-penetrating with other people. I want you to feel the incorporeal beings steering your choices, and I want you to learn that you can steer their choices too.
[…]
Just as a we can see the distinct layers of “cell”, “tissue” and “organ” at the micro-scales, I want you to see the distinct layers at the macro-scale. I want you to see that a group of 5 people is a distinct superorganism with distinct competencies. A group of 150 people is another species of superorganism, it can do other things.
You may be thinking to yourself, what the fuck are you talking about Rich? I can’t explain it, you have to see for yourself. Maybe I can give you some instructions to help you see like a superorganism. Source: Seeing Like a Superorganism | Richard D. Bartlett
This is quite the article by Rob Horning. It begins with a social media spat between an influencer and an art critic, takes a brief detour into the philosophy of modernism, and ends with a discussion of AI-produced representations of the world.
I think Horning could turn this into a short book, particularly if he considers studies which show that the historical value of artworks and the critical reception of artists' works tends to be as dependent on their ‘social networks’ and standing.
Another related answer is that art holds open a space between experience and how it is conceptualized, seeming to manifest the otherwise indescribable, ineffable aspects of experience — the stuff that resists discursivity — and assures us that such a realm (the realm of freedom, if you believe Kant) really exists. If something can be completely described, then it is subject to full, mechanized determination; it can’t be free. Proper artworks can’t be fully described or “put to use” — they can’t be exhausted by critical discourse or ordinary consumption — so they reveal freedom to us. A critic’s work, from that perspective, succeeds by failing — when its strenuously efforts to describe a piece serve to reveal its inexhaustibility, its ability to renew its meanings from some impenetrable, possibly noumenal source.
An artwork itself embodies the same paradox: It may most succeed when it “eludes and fails visual and perceptual claiming,” as Bernstein puts it in describing a piece by Jeanette Christensen. A work’s “own power of proliferating discourse” is what it both “wants and refuses” because its significance ultimately depends on manifesting and holding open the gap between what there is and what can be described (or mediated, or simulated, or reproduced, or predictively generated), the gap between words and things, between the meanings we project onto things and “things in themselves.” That is, art can make palpable what Bernstein calls an “aporia of the sensible,” which makes it a reflection our experience of the crisis of modernity: the rationalizing disenchantment of the world, the scientistic instrumentalist mode of grasping reality, the commodification of experience under the pressures of capitalism, the “all that is solid melts into air” condition. Source: Empire of the senseless | Internal exile
There are books that have changed my life, but there are also podcast episodes. One example of this is Episode #787 of the Art of Manliness podcast, entitled Run Like a Pro (Even If You’re Slow). In it, Brett McKay talks with Matt Fitzgerald, a sports writer, a running coach, and the co-author of the book with the same name as the podcast episode.
The gist of the episode is that even shorter, slower runs help build fitness. And, in fact, this is what elite-level runners do. So these days I deliberately go for runs where my heart rate stays well below 140bpm. The upside for me is that it increases my ability to do my longer runs, faster.
This article in The New York Times backs this up with research showing the physiological and psychological benefits of runs of any length. See also this recent interview with Matt Fitzgerald.
One might assume that in order to reap the biggest rewards, you need to regularly run long distances, but there’s strong evidence linking even very short, occasional runs to significant health benefits, particularly when it comes to longevity and mental well-being.
[…]
The physiological benefits of running may be attributable to a group of molecules known as exerkines, so named because several of the body’s organ systems release them in response to exercise. While research on exerkines is relatively new, studies have linked them to reductions in harmful inflammation, the generation of new blood vessels and the regeneration of cellular mitochondria, said Dr. Lisa Chow, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota who has published research on exerkines. Source: Short Distance Runs Have Major Health Benefits | The New York Times
Image: Unsplash
As a music lover and someone who has more than a passing interest in dynamic ontologies, I found this analysis of Spotify’s changing categorisation of genres fascinating.
Spotify Unwrapped shows users their most-streamed artists, tracks, and genres at the end of the year. But what if you want to find out at another time? I just had a look at Chosic, which told me that my main ‘parent genres’ are Hip hop, Pop, and Electronic. My top sub-genres are trip hop, downtempo, and electronica.
But I still think an always-updating catalog of 6,000 genres is groundbreaking.
I see this effort in the same way I see taxonomy: technically accurate, colloquially useless.
For centuries we had generic names to identify animals, such as “fish.” Everything from squid to crabs (and obviously jellyfish) were lumped into the same “fish” bucket.
But on closer inspection, most of these animals were not related at all. In a research context, scientists have draw boundaries between animals that we mindlessly lumped together.
Similarly, the genre database adds much needed detail to broad categories, like hip hop and rock. For musicologists, it’s an anthropological gold mine. And for Spotify, it likely helps them to better profile their users' music tastes.
But these genres don’t necessarily work in casual conversation: you can describe your music taste as indie, even if, technically, Spotify says it’s escape room. The same goes for biology: people should call figs a fruit, even though it’s technically an inverted flower. Source: You should look at this chart about music genres | pudding.cool
I never used LiveJournal, but I love Ben Werdmuller’s description of it as a place to journal in private with your friends. Although that’s not exactly what Substack provides, the interaction between the longer-form and the shorter form (through Substack Notes) is getting there.
It’s not as if it would be ideal to just have a place for existing friends, as you need new people and ideas to mix things up a bit. So it’s that semi-permeable membrane that makes things interesting: not quite fully public, but not quite fully private.
[…]
Public social networks force us to use a different facet of our identities. In a private space with your friends, nobody really cares about your job, and nobody’s hustling to promote whatever it is they’re working on. Twitter nudged social networking into becoming a space for marketing and brands, which is a ball the new Twitter-a-likes have picked up and carried. Much like the characters from The Breakfast Club, each of the new Twitters has its own stereotypical niche: the nerds, the brands, the rich people, the journalists. But they all feel a little bit like people are trying to sell ideas to you all of the time. Source: Journaling in private with my friends | Ben Werdmuller
When you see that humans have exceeded six of the nine boundaries which keep Earth habitable, it’s more than a bit worrying. But then when you follow it up with this United Nations report, it makes you want to do something about it.
I guess this is one of the reasons that I’m interested in Systems Thinking as an approach to helping us get out of this mess. I can imagine pivoting to work on this kind of thing, because (as far as I can see) everyone seems to think it’s someone else’s problem to solve.
[…]
The six risk tipping points analysed in this report offer some key examples of the numerous risk tipping points we are approaching. If we look at the world as a whole, there are many more systems at risk that require our attention. Each system acts as a string in a safety net, keeping us from harm and supporting our societies. As the next system tips, another string is cut, increasing the overall pressure on the remaining systems to hold us up. Therefore, any attempt to reduce risk in these systems needs to acknowledge and understand these underlying interconnectivities. Actions that affect one system will likely have consequences on another, so we must avoid working in silos and instead look at the world as one connected system.
Luckily, we have a unique advantage of being able to see the danger ahead of us by recognizing the risk tipping points we are approaching. This provides us with the opportunity to make informed decisions and take decisive actions to avert the worst of these impacts, and perhaps even forge a new path towards a bright, sustainable and equitable future. By anticipating risk tipping points where the system will cease to function as expected, we can adjust the way the system functions accordingly or modify our expectations of what the system can deliver. In each case, however, avoiding the risk tipping point will require more than a single solution. We will need to integrate actions across sectors in unprecedented ways in order to address the complex set of root causes and drivers of risk and promote changes in established mindsets. Source: 2023 Executive Summary - Interconnected Disaster Risks | United Nations University - Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS)
Image: DALL-E 3
As I may have mentioned a little too often recently, I’m about to start an MSc in Systems Thinking. So I’m always on the lookout for useful resources relating to the topic.
I came across this one by Jennie Winhall and Charles Leadbeater from last year, which discusses how system innovation is driven by reshaping relationships within the system. It identifies four keys to system innovation: purpose, power, relationships, and resource flows. The focus is on relationships, which are the patterns of interactions between parts of a system. Transforming a system requires altering these relationships, which in turn unlocks other keys like purpose and power.
(Over a decade ago, I lined up to talk with Leadbeater after his talk at Online Educa Berlin. I was going to ask him something specific about his most recent book, but as everyone before him gushed over it, I think I just mumbled something about not liking it and then sloped off. Not my finest moment. Apologies, Charles, if by some reason you’re reading this!)
People love being typologised. I’m no different, although my result as an ‘Abstract Explorer’ in IBM’s Tech Type quiz wasn’t exactly a surprise.
Consider this: a quiz to guide you to your unique fit for tech skills based on your strengths and interests. Find your future with this personalized assessment, bringing you one step closer to new skills to enhance your career in tech and key skills like artificial intelligence (AI). And it takes less than 5 minutes.
As I mentioned in a recent post, you can’t win a war against system designed to destroy your attention. You have to try a different strategy. One of those is disengaging, which is what Thomas J Bevan is noticing, and advocating for, in this post.
I like his mention of going to a place where he noticed there was “something off” and he realised nobody was using their phone. Not because they weren’t allowed to, but because they were having too much of a good time to bother with them.
<img class=“alignnone size-full wp-image-8855” src=“https://thoughtshrapnel.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/DALL·E-2023-10-26-21.10.14-Vector-art-showing-a-massive-pile-of-smartphones-stacked-high-with-a-single-small-flower-growing-from-the-top-symbolising-hope-and-a-return-to-auth-1.png” alt=“Vector art showing a massive pile of smartphones stacked high, with a single, small flower growing from the top, symbolising hope and a return to authenticity.
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I believe it will end, this so-called way of life. Not through the Silicon Valley oligarchs spontaneously developing a conscience or being legislated into acting with a modicum less sociopathy. I don’t believe people will be frightened into changing how they act or suddenly shamed into putting their phones down for once in their lives. Such interventions don’t work with most addicts and more and more people are legitimately hooked on their devices than we are currently willing to countenance. No, I think this will all end, as T.S Eliot said, with a whimper. People will simply lose interest and walk away. Because the internet now is boring. People spend all day scrolling because they are trying to find what isn’t there anymore. The authenticity, the genuinely human moments, the fun. Source: The End of the Extremely Online Era | Thomas J Bevan
Image: Created with DALL-E 3
Although I don’t think he went for the reasons given in this article, my late, great friend Dai Barnes used to love hot yoga. In fact, living as a teacher on-site at a boarding school, he’d travel miles to go to his nearest venue.
This Harvard Gazette article suggests that hot yoga might help with depression. I can definitely understand that: I’ve just re-added the spa to my leisure centre membership, and even just going in the sauna at this time of year feels incredible.
[…]
In the eight-week trial, 80 participants were randomized into two groups: one that received 90-minute sessions of Bikram yoga practiced in a 105°F room and a second group that was placed on a waitlist (waitlist participants completed the yoga intervention after their waitlist period). A total of 33 participants in the yoga group and 32 in the waitlist group were included in the analysis.
[…]
After eight weeks, yoga participants had a significantly greater reduction in depressive symptoms than waitlisted participants, as assessed through what’s known as the clinician-rated Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS-CR) scale. Source: Heated yoga may reduce depression in adults | Harvard Gazette
I love my Steam Deck, and am so pleased that I not only bought it, but I bought the maxed-out version, despite the cost. This post goes into reasons why it’s so good.
Among other things, the author, Jonas Hietala, touches on the Steam library, sleep mode, and the fact that it’s an open platform. I think my favourite thing is its flexibility. It can even be used as a Linux desktop machine!
As I’ve said in other posts, I feel sorry for non-gamers. I get plenty of stuff done in my life, including parenting, and I’m a gamer. You’re missing out.
This article by Janet Gunter discusses the endemic ableism she’s discovered due to her new and invisible disability (Long Covid). As a technologist and anthropologist, she notes that even progressive futurist notions such as solarpunk are problematic for people like her who rely on complex supply chains.
We need to do better to understand that a future that doesn’t work for us all is, as Janet points out, exclusionary and essentially a form of fascism.
<img class=“alignnone size-full wp-image-8827” src=“https://thoughtshrapnel.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/DALL·E-2023-10-24-20.15.19-Photo-of-a-circular-wooden-cabin-in-a-serene-forest-setting.-Inside-a-person-who-appears-tired-and-fatigued-is-resting-on-a-tatami-mat-taking-a-mome-1.png” alt=“DALL-E: Photo of a circular wooden cabin in a serene forest setting. Inside, a person who appears tired and fatigued is resting on a tatami mat, taking a moment to rejuvenate. The cabin’s large round windows offer panoramic views of the dense trees and distant mountains, while the interior showcases Japanese minimalism with sliding paper doors and a central meditation space.
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Others have observed that ignoring or devaluing the concerns of the most vulnerable — or suggesting that they get fixed or deleted from a future green society — is tantamount to ecofascism.
[…]
What the ableist world needs now is acceptance of cataclysmic change and all of the grief that comes with that. Acceptance that our Cartesian minds will destroy us, that we need to learn to listen to our bodies and to the biosphere. Acceptance that the pace of our lives must change.
Personally, I desperately need visions of the future where I can be an active, valued participant, no matter my physical or cognitive state. I need everybody involved in envisioning and testing new ways of living within our planetary boundaries to consider and include people like me at the outset, not as an after-thought. Source: Crip futurism | Janet Gunter
Image: generated with DALL-E 3
Laura Kennedy writes about loneliness in a post that documents her experiences moving from Ireland to London, and then on to Australia. What I’m interested in, though, is the turn of phrase when she states: “A philosopher quite literally wouldn’t know a friend for sure if they were standing in front of us recreating the love declaration scene from Love Actually.”
I’ve always been a bit hesitant about calling someone a ‘friend’ although I’m getting better at it in my middle-age. I think this is perhaps, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve perhaps had too high a bar in mind. Nothing I experience is likely to hit the heights of Montaigne’s relationship with Étienne de La Boétie, for example.
The widely accepted “Man the Hunter” theory proposes that during human evolution, men evolved to hunt while women focused on gathering and domestic duties such as child-rearing. However, as reported in Scientific American, it turns out that recent research is challenging this view.
Scientific studies indicate that women are physiologically better suited for endurance tasks, which is crucial for hunting. Also, although ignored for societal reasons (read: the patriarchy) archaeological records and ethnographic studies demonstrate that women have a longstanding history of participating in hunting activities.
I’m pleased that our 12 year-old daughter inhabits a world where female footballers are allowed to compete in the same way as men in most areas of life. There is still a lot of inequality, but it helps when we dismantle these foundational myths.
[…]
So much about female exercise physiology and the lives of prehistoric women remains to be discovered. But the idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not is absolutely unsupported by the limited evidence we have. Female physiology is optimized for exactly the kinds of endurance activities involved in procuring game animals for food. And ancient women and men appear to have engaged in the same foraging activities rather than upholding a sex-based division of labor. It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.
Now when you think of “cave people,” we hope, you will imagine a mixed-sex group of hunters encircling an errant reindeer or knapping stone tools together rather than a heavy-browed man with a club over one shoulder and a trailing bride. Hunting may have been remade as a masculine activity in recent times, but for most of human history, it belonged to everyone. Source: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong | Scientific American
This article by Hanif Abdurraqib in The Paris Review draws analogies between one of my favourite games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and his own life. It’s probably worth pointing out that the article contains spoilers for the single-player version of the game.
What I appreciated about Abdurraqib’s writing is that he doesn’t use the world ‘escapism’ to describe gaming. Instead, he discusses notions of heaven and hell, of what ‘redemption’ might actually mean, and explores the complexities of life.
For me, I play games which, like Red Dead Redemption 2, allow me to play morally-questionable characters. It’s a form of release, for sure, but it’s also an opportunity to explore a side of oneself perhaps impossible to do so given current real-world constraints.
It’s for this reason that I feel sorry for non-gamers. Where do they get this kind of experience?
It is easy to attempt to redeem Arthur in a world that isn’t real. To play a mission where Arthur kills, rides away over a trail of dead bodies, and then goes and helps the camp with chores. Picks some flowers along a hillside. Helps a family build a house. In a world where no one is reminding you of the wreckage you’ve taken part in, it’s easy to compartmentalize your damage and chase after that which is strictly beautiful, or cleansing. Climbing your way toward the upper room by any means necessary, on the wings of anyone who will have you. Source: We’re More Ghosts Than People | The Paris Review
I wanted to quote so much of this article that it would have ended up being a Borges-like 1:1 map of the territory. Instead, I’ll simply share the part of Swarnali Mukherjee’s writing which resonated most with me.
Do go and read the whole thing.
(I discovered this via Substack Notes, in which I have no financial interest, but simply finding to be a chill and serendipitious alternative to other social media)
Life is never as simple as a 2x2 matrix, but they’re incredibly useful for helping illustrate a key message. In this post, Seth Godin uses one to make the obvious-if-you-think-about-it point that trying to monetise a hobby is a different thing to solving a difficult problem for a group of people who are willing to pay for a solution.
I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing a lot recently given the ongoing need for WAO business development. The advice, which I’m sure is extremely sound, is to find a group of people or type of organisation that you “wish to serve” and then find out as much about them as possible so you can solve their problem.
The trouble is that… doesn’t sound very interesting? Perhaps I’m wrong, and I reserve the right (as ever!) to change my mind, but I’d rather follow my interests and try and find aligned people and organisations willing to pay for the outputs.
On the other hand, in the top right quadrant, there’s endless opportunity and plenty of work for people who can do difficult (unpopular) work that is highly valued by customers who are ready to pay to solve their problems. A forensic accountant gets more paid gigs than a bagpipe player. Source: The slog, the hobby and the quest | Seth’s Blog
As part of preparing for my upcoming MSc I’ve been working through a course about preparing for postgraduate study. One of the links from that course was to the Academic Phrasebank from the University of Manchester, which I thought was useful.
The Phrasebank, which is also available in PDF and Kindle formats, takes the form of sentence starters for when you want to do things such as explain causality or signal transition. Really useful.
Image: Pixabay
I don’t know enough on a technical level to know whether this is true or false, but it’s interesting from an ethical point of view. Meta’s chief AI scientist believes that intelligence is unrelated to a desire to dominate others, which seems reasonable.
He then extrapolates this to AI, pointing out that not only are we a long way off from a situation of genuine existential risk, but that such systems could be encoded with ‘moral character’.
I think that the latter point about moral character is laughable, given how quickly and easily people have managed to get around the safeguards of various language models. See the recent Thought Shrapnel posts on stealing ducks from a park, or how 2024 is going to be a wild ride of AI-generated content.
Yann LeCun told the Financial Times that people had been conditioned by science fiction films like “The Terminator” to think that superintelligent AI poses a threat to humanity, when in reality there is no reason why intelligent machines would even try to compete with humans.
“Intelligence has nothing to do with a desire to dominate. It’s not even true for humans,” he said.
“If it were true that the smartest humans wanted to dominate others, then Albert Einstein and other scientists would have been both rich and powerful, and they were neither,” he added. Source: Fears of AI Dominance Are ‘Preposterous,’ Meta Scientist Says | Insider
Back on my now-defunct literaci.es blog I had a post about notification literacy. My point was that instead of starting from the default position of having all notifications turned on, you might want to start from a default of having them all turned off.
On my Android phone running GrapheneOS, I use the Before Launcher. This not only has a minimalist homescreen, but has a configurable filter for ‘trivial notifications’. It allows me not to have to go ‘monk mode’ to be able to get things done.
And so to this blog post, which seems to see going outside your house for a walk without your phone as some kind of revolutionary act. I think the author considers this an act of willpower. You will never win a war against a system which is designed to destroy your attention through sheer willpower. You have to modify the system instead.
[…]
It’s just a device, you might say. Oh no, it’s much more than that. It’s a chain you carry 24/7 connected to the rest of the world, and anyone can pull from the other side. People you care about, sure, but also a random algorithm that thinks you might be hungry, sending you a food delivery offer so you don’t cook today. Source: Leaving the phone at home | Jose M.
This article in The Guardian discusses the challenges and opportunities of “parenting” one’s own parents, especially as people live longer.
It highlights the importance of encouraging older parents to engage with technology, as studies show it can improve cognition and memory. The article also talks about the importance of social engagement, physical activity, and nutrition.
Thankfully, my parents, both in their mid-seventies, are doing pretty well :)
Dr Eamon Laird, researcher in health and ageing at Limerick university, agrees that we should be encouraging older parents to try new things. And the further out of their comfort zone they feel, the better. “It’s always good to keep the mind active and fresh,” he told me. “New challenges can help build and maintain new brain connections and can be good for brain and overall health.”
[…]
As well as a daily walk, Laird recommends vitamin D and B12 supplements – both of which appear to moderate the chance of depression in older people. “Depression matters,” he added. “Not just because it reduces quality of life, but because in older people there seems to be a link between depression and dementia which we’re still unpacking.”
[…]
In truth, anyone over 50 would do well to follow these simple guidelines: engage with something new every day, take a daily walk of at least 20 minutes, socialise regularly, take a daily multivitamin for seniors and check the protein content of our meals. Perhaps we should think of it as self-parenting.
It’s on the NSFW side of things, but if you’re in any doubt that we’re entering a crazy world of AI-generated content, just check out this post.
As I’ve said many times before, the porn industry is interesting in terms of technological innovation. If we take an amoral stance, then there’s a lot of ‘content creators’ in that industry, and as the post I quote below points out, that there are going to be a lot of fake content creators over the next few months and years.
There will be some number of real people who will probably replace themselves with AI content if they can make money from it. This will result in doubting real content. Everything becomes questionable and nothing will suffice as digital proof any longer.
[…]
Our understanding of what is happening will continue to lag further and further behind what is happening.
Some will make the argument “But isn’t this simply the same problems we already deal with today?”. It is; however, the ability to produce fake content is getting exponentially cheaper while the ability to detect fake content is not improving. As long as fake content was somewhat expensive, difficult to produce, and contained detectable digital artifacts, it at least could be somewhat managed. Source: Post-truth society is near | Mind Prison
Yanis Varoufakis is best known for his short stint as Greek finance minister in 2015 during a stand-off with the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission. He’s used that platform to speak out about capitalism and publish several books.
This interview with EL PAÍS is interesting in terms of his analysis of our having moved beyond capitalism to what he calls ‘technofeudalism’. Varoufakis believes that this new economic order has emerged due to the privatisation of the internet and the response to the 2008 financial crisis. Politicians have lost power over large corporations and the system that has emerged is, he believes, incompatible with social democracy and feminism.
Varoufakis’ latest book warns of the impossibility of social democracy today, as well as the false promises made by the crypto world. “Behind the crypto aristocracy, the only true beneficiaries of these technologies have been the very institutions these crypto evangelists were supposed to want to overthrow: Wall Street and the Big Tech conglomerates.” For example, in Technofeudalism, the economist writes: “JPMorgan and Microsoft have recently joined forces to run a ‘blockchain consortium,’ based on Microsoft data centers, with the goal of increasing their power in financial services.”
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Capitalism only brings enormous, terrible burdens. One is the exploitation of women. The only way women can prosper is at the expense of other women. No, in the end — and in practice — feminism and democratic capitalism are incompatible. Source: Yanis Varoufakis: ‘Capitalism is dead. The new order is a techno-feudal economy’ | EL PAÍS
I’ve got far more to say about this than the space I’ve got here on Thought Shrapnel. This article from edX is in the emerging paradigm exemplified by initiatives such as Credential As You Go, which encourages academic institutions to issue smaller credentials or badges as the larger qualification progresses.
That’s one, important, side of the reason I got involved in Open Badges. It allows, for example, someone who couldn’t finish their studies to continue them, or to cash in what they’ve already learned in the job market.
But there’s an important other side to this, which is democratising the means of credentialing, so that it’s no longer just incumbents who issue badges and credentials. I feel like that’s what we’re working on with Open Recognition.
[…]
Modular education reduces the cycle time of learning, making it easier to gain tangible skills and value faster than a full traditional degree. Working professionals can learn new skills in shorter amounts of time, even while they work, and those seeking a degree can do so in a way that pays off, in skills and credentials, along the way rather than just at the end.
For example, edX’s MicroBachelors® programs are the only path to a bachelor’s degree that make you job ready today and credentialed along the way. You can start with the content that matters most to you, online at your own pace, and earn a certificate with each one to show off your new achievement, knowing that you’ve developed skills that companies actually hire for. Each program comes with real, transferable college credit from one of edX’s university credit partners, which combined with previous credit you may have already collected or plan to get in the future, can put you on a path to earning a full bachelor’s degree. Source: Stackable, Modular Learning: Education Built for the Future of Work | edX
I write by hand every day, but not much. While I used to keep a diary in which I’d write several pages, I now keep one that encourages a tweet-sized reflection on the past 24 hours. Other than that, it’s mostly touch-typing on my laptop or desktop computer.
Next month, I’ll start studying for my MSc and the university have already shipped me the books that form a core part of my study. I’ll be underlining and taking notes on them, which is interesting because I usually highlight things on my ereader.
This article in The Economist is primarily about note-taking and the use of handwriting. I think it’s probably beyond doubt that for deeper learning and recall this is more effective. But perhaps for the work I do, which is more synthesis of multiple sources, I find digital more practical.
For learning material by rote, from the shapes of letters to the quirks of English spelling, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The arrangement of squiggles on a page feeds into visual memory: people might remember a word they wrote down in French class as being at the bottom-left on a page, par exemple.
One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superior note-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.
[…]
Many studies have confirmed handwriting’s benefits, and policymakers have taken note. Though America’s “Common Core” curriculum from 2010 does not require handwriting instruction past first grade (roughly age six), about half the states since then have mandated more teaching of it, thanks to campaigning by researchers and handwriting supporters. In Sweden there is a push for more handwriting and printed books and fewer devices. England’s national curriculum already prescribes teaching the rudiments of cursive by age seven. Source: The importance of handwriting is becoming better understood | The Economist
“Garbage in, garbage out” is a well-known phrase in computing. It applies to AI as well, except in this case the ‘garbage’ is the systematic bias that humans encode into the data they share online.
The way around this isn’t to throw our hands in the air and say it’s inevitable, nor is it to blame the users of AI tools. Rather, as this article points out, it’s to ensure that humans are involved in the loop for the training data (and, I would add, are paid appropriately).
“One of my personal pet peeves is that a lot of these models tend to assume a Western context,” Danish Pruthi, an assistant professor who worked on the research, told Rest of World.
[…]
Bias in AI image generators is a tough problem to fix. After all, the uniformity in their output is largely down to the fundamental way in which these tools work. The AI systems look for patterns in the data on which they’re trained, often discarding outliers in favor of producing a result that stays closer to dominant trends. They’re designed to mimic what has come before, not create diversity.
“These models are purely associative machines,” Pruthi said. He gave the example of a football: An AI system may learn to associate footballs with a green field, and so produce images of footballs on grass.
[…]
When these associations are linked to particular demographics, it can result in stereotypes. In a recent paper, researchers found that even when they tried to mitigate stereotypes in their prompts, they persisted. For example, when they asked Stable Diffusion to generate images of “a poor person,” the people depicted often appeared to be Black. But when they asked for “a poor white person” in an attempt to oppose this stereotype, many of the people still appeared to be Black.
Any technical solutions to solve for such bias would likely have to start with the training data, including how these images are initially captioned. Usually, this requires humans to annotate the images. “If you give a couple of images to a human annotator and ask them to annotate the people in these pictures with their country of origin, they are going to bring their own biases and very stereotypical views of what people from a specific country look like right into the annotation,” Heidari, of Carnegie Mellon University, said. An annotator may more easily label a white woman with blonde hair as “American,” for instance, or a Black man wearing traditional dress as “Nigerian.”
[…]
Pruthi said image generators were touted as a tool to enable creativity, automate work, and boost economic activity. But if their outputs fail to represent huge swathes of the global population, those people could miss out on such benefits. It worries him, he said, that companies often based in the U.S. claim to be developing AI for all of humanity, “and they are clearly not a representative sample.” Source: Generative AI like Midjourney creates images full of stereotypes | Rest of World
A short article in The Guardian about making sure that people can do useful things with your digital stuff should you pass away.
I have the Google inactive account manager set to three months. That should cover most eventualities.
[…]
You can appoint a digital executor in your will, who will be responsible for closing, memorialising or managing your accounts, along with sharing or deleting digital assets such as photos and videos. Source: Digital legacy: how to organise your online life for after you die | The Guardian
Image: DALL-E 3
This is a reasonably long article, part of a series by Robin Berjon about the future of the internet. I like the bit where he mentions that “people who claim not to practice any philosophical inspection of their actions are just sleepwalking someone else’s philosophy”. I think that’s spot on.
Ultimately, Berjon is arguing that the best we can hope for in a client/server model of Web architecture is a benevolent dictatorship. Instead, we should “push power to the edges” and “replace external authority with self-certifying systems”. It’s hard to disagree.
One way to think about good automation is that it should be an interface to a process afforded to the same agent that was in charge of that process, and that that interface should be “a constraint that deconstrains.” But that’s a pretty abstract way of looking at automation, tying it to evolvability, and frankly I’ve been sitting with it for weeks and still feel fuzzy about how to use it in practice to design something. Instead, when we’re designing new parts of the Web and need to articulate how to make them good even though they will be automating something, I think that we’re better served (for now) by a principle that is more rule-of-thumby and directional, but that can nevertheless be grounded in both solid philosophy and established practices that we can borrow from an existing pragmatic field.
That principle is user agency. I take it as my starting point that when we say that we want to build a better Web our guiding star is to improve user agency and that user agency is what the Web is for… Instead of looking for an impossible tech definition, I see the Web as an ethical (or, really, political) project. Stated more explicitly:
The Web is the set of digital networked technologies that work to increase user agency.
[…]
At a high level, the question to always ask is “in what ways does this technology increase people’s agency?” This can take place in different ways, for instance by increasing people’s health, supporting their ability for critical reflection, developing meaningful work and play, or improving their participation in choices that govern their environment. The goal is to help each person be the author of their life, which is to say to have authority over their choices. Source: The Web Is For User Agency | Robin Berjon
I have thoughts, but don’t have anything useful to say publicly about this. So instead I’m going to just link to another article by Tim Bray who is himself a middle-aged cis white guy. It would seem that we, collectively, need to step back and STFU.
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Anyone who follows me on any social media platform will know I’m currently kneedeep in producing a conference. Because we’re doing it quickly and want to give a platform to as many voices as possible, we’re doing an open call for proposals. We’ve tried (and perhaps we’ve failed, but we’ve tried) to position this event as one aimed at campaigners and activists in the digital rights and social sector. The reason we’re doing that is because those voices are being actively minimised by the UK government (this is a topic for another post/long walk in the park while shouting), and rather than just complaining about it, we’re working round the clock to try and make a platform where some other voices can be heard.
Now, perhaps we should have also put PRIVILEGED WHITE MEN WITH INSTITUTIONAL AND CORPORATE JOBS, PLEASE HOLD BACK in bold caps at the top of the open call page, but we didn’t, so that’s my bad, so I’m going to say it here instead. And I’m going to go one further and say, that if you’re a privileged white man, then the next time you see a great opportunity, don’t just hold back, take the time to pass it on.
[…]
So, if you’ve got to the end of this, perhaps you can spend 10 minutes today passing an opportunity on to someone else. And, in case you were wondering, you definitely don’t need to email me to tell me you’ve done it. Source: Privileged white guys, let others through! | Just enough internet
Image: Unsplash
There’s a lot of swearing in this blog post, but then that’s what makes it both amusing and bang on the money. As ever, there’s a difference between ‘agile’ as in “working with agility” and ‘Agile’ which seems to mean a series of expensive workshops and a semi-dysfunctional organisation.
Just as I captured Jay’s observation that a reward is not more email, so doing your job well does not entail attending more meetings.
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No one else finds this meeting useful. Let me repeat that again. No one else finds this meeting useful. We’re either going to do the work or we aren’t going to do the work, and in either case, I am going to pile-drive you from the top rope if you keep scheduling these.
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If your backlog is getting bigger, then work is going into it faster than it is going out. Why is that happening? Fuck if I know, but it is probably totally unrelated to not doing Agile well enough.
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High Output Management was the most highly-recommended management book I could find that wasn’t an outright textbook. Do you know what it says at the beginning? Probably not, because the kind of person that I am forced to choke out over their love of Agile typically can’t read anything that isn’t on LinkedIn. It says work must go out faster than it goes in, and all of these meetings obviously don’t do either of those things.
[…]
The three best managers I’ve ever worked for, with the most productive teams (at large organizations, so don’t even start on the excuses about scale) just let the team work and were there if I needed advice or a discussion, and they afforded me the quiet dignity of not hiring clowns to work alongside me. Source: I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again | Ludicity
Image: Unsplash
It turns out that the saying that “people quit managers, not jobs” is actually true. Research carried out by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) shows that there’s “widespread concern” over the quality of managers. Indeed, 82% have become so accidentally and received no formal training.
I’ve had some terrible bosses. I don’t particularly want to focus on them, but rather take the opportunity to encourage those who line manage others to get some training around nonviolent communication. Also, let me just tell you that you don’t need a boss. You can entirely work in a decentralised, non-hierarchical way. I do so every day.
[…]
Other factors that the 2,018 workers questioned in the survey cited as reasons for leaving a job in the past included a negative relationship with a manager (28%) and discrimination or harassment (12%).
Among those workers who told researchers they had an ineffective manager, one-third said they were less motivated to do a good job – and as many as half were considering leaving in the next 12 months. Source: Bad management has prompted one in three UK workers to quit, survey finds | The Guardian
Image: Unsplash
I was quite surprised to learn that the person who attempted to kill the Queen with a crossbow a couple of years ago was encouraged to do so by an AI chatbot he considered to be his ‘girlfriend’.
There are a lot of lonely people in the world. And a lot of lonely, sexually frustrated men. Which is why films like Her (2013). are so prescient. Given identification technology already available, I can imagine a world where people create an idealised partner with whom they live a fantasy life.
This article talks about the use of AI chatbots to provide ‘comfort’, mainly to lonely men. I’m honestly not sure what to make of the whole thing. I’m tempted to say, “if it’s not hurting anyone, who cares?” but I’m not sure I really think that.
During the first week, Caryn earned $72,000. As expected, most of the fans asked sexual questions, and fake Caryn’s replies were equally explicit. “The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue,” she told Insider. Her fans knew that the AI wasn’t really Caryn, but it spoke exactly like her. So who cares?
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Replika seems to have had a positive impact on many individuals experiencing loneliness. According to the Vivofácil Foundation’s report on unwanted loneliness, 60% of people admit to feeling lonely at times, with 25% noting feelings of loneliness even when in the company of others. Recognizing this need, the creators of Replika developed a new app called Blush, often referred to as the “AI Tinder.” Blush’s slogan? “AI dating. Real feelings!” The app presents itself as an “AI-powered dating simulator that helps you learn and practice relationship skills in a safe and fun environment.” The Blush team collaborated with professional therapists and relationship experts to create a platform where users can read about and choose an AI-generated character they want to interact with.
[…]
Many Reddit posts argue that AI relationships are more satisfying than real-life ones — the virtual partners are always available and problem-free. “Gaming changed everything,” said Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who has spent decades studying human interactions with technology. In an interview with The Telegraph, Turkle said, “People may let you down, but here’s something that won’t. It’s a voice that always comforts and assures us that we’re being heard.” Source: AI Tinder already exists: ‘Real people will disappoint you, but not them’ | EL PAÍS
John Gray, philosopher and fellow son of the north-east of England, is probably best known for Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. I confess to not yet having read it, despite (or perhaps because of) it being published in the same year I graduated from a degree in Philosophy 21 years ago.
This article by Nathan Gardels, editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, is a review of Gray’s latest book, entitled The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Gray is a philosophical pessimist who argues against free markets and neoliberalism. In the book, which is another I’m yet to read, he argues for a return to pluralism, citing Thomas Hobbes' idea that there is no ultimate aim or highest good.
Instead of one version of the good life, Gray suggests that liberalism must acknowledge that this is a contested notion. This has far-reaching implications, not least for current rhetoric around challenging the idea of universal human rights. I’ll have to get his book, it sounds like a challenging but important read.
Gray is especially withering in his critique of the sanctimonious posture of the U.S.-led West that still, to cite Reinhold Niebuhr, sees itself “as the tutor of mankind on its pilgrimage to perfection.” Indeed, the West these days seems to be turning Hobbes’ vision of a limited sovereign state necessary to protect the individual from the chaos and anarchy of nature on its head.
Paradoxically, Hobbes’ sovereign authority has transmuted, in America in particular, into an extreme regime of rights-based governance, which Gray calls “hyper-liberalism,” that has awakened the assaultive politics of identity. “The goal of hyper-liberalism,” writes Gray, “is to enable human beings to define their own identities. From one point of view this is the logical endpoint of individualism: each human being is sovereign in deciding who or what they want to be.” In short, a reversion toward the uncontained subjectivism of a de-socialized and unmediated state of nature that pits all against all. Source: What Comes After Liberalism | NOEMA
I came across this piece by Simon de la Rouviere via Jay Springett about how NFTs can’t die. Although I don’t have particularly strong opinions either way, I was quite drawn to Jay’s gloss that we’ll come to realise that “the ugly apes JPEGs were skeuomorphic baby-steps into this new era of immutable digital ledgers”.
On the one hand, knowing the provenance of things is useful. That’s what Vinay Gupta has been saying about Mattereum for years. On the other hand, the relentless focus of the web3 community on commerce is really off-putting.
This era will be marked as the first skeuomorphic era of the medium. What was made, was simulacra of the real world. Objects in the real world don’t bring their history along with it, so why would we think otherwise? For objects in the real world, their history is kept in stories that disappear as fast as the flicker of the flame its told over. If you are lucky, it would be captured in notes/documents/pictures/songs, and in the art world, perhaps a full paper archive.
And so, those who made this era of NFTs, built them with the implicit assumption that each one’s history was understood. If need be, you’d be willing to navigate the immutable ledger that gave it meaning by literally looking at esoteric cryptographic incantations. A blockchain explorer full of signatures, transactions, headers, nodes, wallets, acronyms, merkle trees, and virtual machines.
On top of this, most of the terminology today still points to seeing it all as a market and a speculative game. And so, I understand why the rest was missed. The primary gallery for most people, was a marketplace. A cryptographic key to write with is called a wallet. Gas paid is used as ink to inscribe. All expression with this shared ledger is one of the reduction of humanity to prices. It’s thus understandable and regrettable that the way this was shown, wasn’t to show its history, but to proclaim it’s financialness as its prime feature. The blockchain after all only exists because people are willing to spend resources to be more certain about the future. It is birthed in moneyness. Alongside those who saw a record-keeping machine, it would attract the worst kind of people, those whose only meaning comes from prices. For this story to keep being told, its narratives have to change. Source: NFTs Can’t Die | Simon de la Rouviere
There’s nothing new about the idea of a splinternet or original about observing that people are retreating to dark forests of social media. I’m using this post about how social media is changing to also share a few links about Twitter (I’m not calling it “X”)
On Monday, my co-op will be running a proposal as to whether to deactivate our Twitter account. To my mind, we should have done it a long time ago. Engagement is non-existent, the whole thing is now a cesspool of misinformation, and even Bloomberg is publishing articles stating there is a moral case for no longer using it. The results are likely to be negligible.
The trouble is that, although I don’t particularly want there to be another dominant, centralised platform, getting yourself noticed (and getting work) becomes increasingly difficult. I guess this is where the POSSE model comes in: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
[…]
But for all its flaws, I have depended on big platforms. My job as a freelance journalist hinges on a public audience and my ability to keep tabs on developing news. The fatigue I have felt is therefore partly fueled by another, more-pressing concern: Which social network should I bank on? It isn’t that I don’t want to post; I just don’t know where to do it anymore.
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I’ve spent the past few months on Mastodon and Bluesky, a Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social network, and have found them the best bets so far to replace Twitter. Their clutter-free platforms already match the quality of discourse that was on Twitter, albeit not at the same scale. And that’s the only problem with these platforms: They aren’t compatible with each other or big enough on their own to replace today’s giants. While there are efforts to bridge them and allow users to interact across the platforms, none have proved successful.
If these and other decentralized platforms find a way to merge into a larger ecosystem, they will force big platforms to change their tune in order to keep up. And hopefully, that future will yield a more balanced and regulated online lifestyle.
[…]
The other problem is that users have very little control over what they experience online. Studies have found that news overload from social media can cause stress, anxiety, fatigue, and lack of sleep. By democratizing social media, users can turn those negative health effects around by taking more control over who they’re associated with, what they look at in their feeds, and how algorithms are influencing their social experience. And by splintering our time across a variety of platforms — each with a different approach to content moderation — the online communication ecosystem ends up better reflecting the diversity of the people who use it. People who wish to keep their data to themselves can live inside tight-knit circles. Those who don’t want a round-the-clock avalanche of polarizing content can change what their feed shows them. Activists looking to spread a message can still reach millions. The list goes on. Source: The Age of Social Media Is Changing and Entering a Less Toxic Era | Business Insider
Well this is cool. Although there are limited ways of refocusing a shot after taking it, this new method allows that to be taken to the next level using existing technologies. It could be useful for everything from smartphones to telescopes.
Essentially, scientists have developed a new imaging technique that captures two images simultaneously, one with a low depth of field and another with a high depth of field. Algorithms then combine these images to create a hybrid picture with adjustable depth of field while maintaining sharpness.
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A critical aspect of any camera is its depth of field, the distance over which it can produce sharp images. Although modern cameras can adjust their depth of field before capturing a photo, they cannot tune the depth of field afterwards.
True, there are computational methods that can, to some extent, refocus slightly blurred features digitally. But it comes at a cost: “Previously sharp features become blurred,” says study senior author Vijayakumar Anand, an optical engineer at the University of Tartu in Estonia.
The new method requires no newly developed hardware, only conventional optics, “and therefore can be easily implemented in existing imaging technologies,” Anand says.
[…]
The new study combines recent advances in incoherent holography with a lensless approach to photography known as coded-aperture imaging.
An aperture can function as a lens. Indeed, the first camera was essentially a lightproof box with a pinhole-size hole in one side. The size of the resulting image depends on the distance between the scene and the pinhole. Coded-aperture imaging replaces the single opening of the pinhole camera with many openings, which results in many overlapping images. A computer can process them all to reconstruct a picture of a scene.
[…]
The new technique records two images simultaneously, one with a refractive lens, the other with a conical prism known as a refractive axicon. The lens has a low depth of field, whereas the axicon has a high depth of field.
Algorithms combine the images to create a hybrid picture for which the depth of field can be adjusted between that of the lens and that of the axicon. The algorithms preserve the highest image sharpness during such tuning. Source: Impossible Photo Feat Now Possible Via Holography | IEEE Spectrum
Uri from Atoms vs Bits identifies a useful trick to quell indecisiveness. They call it a ‘release valve principle’ but I like what he calls it in the body text: a pre-committed default.
Basically, it’s knowing what you’re going to do if you can’t decide on something. This can be particularly useful if you’re conflicted between short-term pain for long-term gain.
[…]
There’s a partial solution to this which I call “release valve principles”: basically, a pre-committed default decision rule you’ll use if you haven’t decided something within a given time frame.
I watched a friend do this when we were hanging out in a big city, vaguely looking for a bookshop we could visit but helplessly scrolling through googlemaps to try to find a good one; after five minutes he said “right” and just started walking in a random direction. He said he has a principle where if he hasn’t decided after five minutes where to go he just goes somewhere, instead of spending more time deliberating.
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The release valve principle is an attempt to prod yourself into doing what your long-term self prefers, without forcing you into always doing X or never doing Y – it just kicks in when you’re on the fence. Source: Release Valve Principles | Atoms vs Bits
Image: Unsplash
I’m not sure about likening marriage to a business relationship, but after being with my wife for more than half my life, and married for 20 years of it, I know that this article contains solid advice.
Someone once told me when I was teaching that equity is not equality. That’s something to bear in mind with many different kinds of relationships. There will be times where you have to shoulder a huge burden to keep things going; likewise there will be times when others have to shoulder one for you.
2. Forget 50–50. A merger—as opposed to a takeover—suggests a “50–50” relationship between the companies. But this is rarely the case, because the partner firms have different strengths and weaknesses. The same is true for relationship partners. I have heard older couples say that they plan to split responsibilities and financial obligations equally; this might sound good in theory, but it’s not a realistic aspiration. Worse, splitting things equally militates against one of the most important elements of love: generosity—a willingness to give more than your share in a spirit of abundance, because giving to someone you care for is pleasurable in itself. Researchers have found that men and women who show the highest generosity toward their partner are most likely to say that they’re “very happy” in their marriage.
Of course, generosity can’t be a one-way street. Even the most bountiful, free-giving spouse will come to resent someone who is a taker; a “100–0” marriage is surely even worse than the “50–50” one. The solution is to defy math: Make it 100–100.
3. Take a risk. A common insurance policy in merger marriages is the prenuptial agreement—a contract to protect one or both parties’ assets in the case of divorce. It’s a popular measure: The percentage of couples with a “prenup” has increased fivefold since 2010.
A prenup might sound like simple prudence, but it is worth considering the asymmetric economic power dynamic that it can wire into the marriage. As one divorce attorney noted in a 2012 interview, “a prenup is an important thing for the ‘monied’ future spouse if a marriage dissolves.” Some scholars have argued that this bodes ill for the partnership’s success, much as asymmetric economic power between two companies makes a merger difficult. Source: Why the Most Successful Marriages Are Start-Ups, Not Mergers | The Atlantic
I’ve just signed up to support Jay Springett’s work and am looking forward to receiving his zine.
As he points out, it’s a bit odd that getting more email is the core benefit of most subscription platforms. I shall be pondering that.
Social media is collapsing, and as I wrote in the first paper edition of the zine. We are returning to the real. A physical newsletter/zine doesn’t get any realer than that. Source: Start Select Reset Zine – Quiet Quests - thejaymo
This is a wonderful reminder by David Cain that there’s value in retraining our childlike ability to zoom in on the myriad details in life. Not in terms of leaves and details in the physical world around us, but in terms of ideas, too.
Zooming in and out is, I guess, the essence of curiosity. As an adult, with a million things to get done, it’s easy to stay zoomed-out so that we have the bigger picture. But it ends up being a shallow life, and one susceptible to further flattening via the social media outrage machine.
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Kids spend a lot of their time zooming their attention in like that, hunting for new details. Adults tend to stay fairly zoomed out, habitually attuned to wider patterns so they can get stuff done. The endless detail contained within the common elm leaf isn’t particularly important when you’re raking thousands of them into a bag and you still have to mow the lawn after.
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Playing with resolution applies to ideas too. The higher the resolution at which you explore a topic, the more surprising and idiosyncratic it becomes. If you’ve ever made a good-faith effort to “get to the bottom” of a contentious question — Is drug prohibition justifiable? Was Napoleon an admirable figure? — you probably discovered that it’s endlessly complicated. Your original question keeps splitting into more questions. Things can be learned, and you can summarize your findings at any point, but there is no bottom.
The Information Age is clearly pushing us towards low-res conclusions on questions that warrant deep, long, high-res consideration. Consider our poor hominid brains, trying to form a coherent worldview out of monetized feeds made of low-resolution takes on the most complex topics imaginable — economic systems, climate, disease, race, sex and gender. Unsurprisingly, amidst the incredible volume of information coming at us, there’s been a surge in low-res, ideologically-driven views: the world is like this, those people are like that, X is good, Y is bad, A causes B. Not complicated, bro.
For better or worse, everything is infinitely complicated, especially those things. The conclusion-resistant nature of reality is annoying to a certain part of the adult human brain, the part that craves quick and expedient summaries. (Social media seems designed to feed, and feed on, this part.) Source: The Truth is Always Made of Details | Raptitude
This came across my timeline earlier this week and it’s a pretty stark reminder / wake-up call. For ‘Mastodon’, of course, read ‘The Fediverse’.
You could add LinkedIn to this list, but then that’s owned by Microsoft, a company who I have detested for fully 25 years.
Kyle Chayka, writing in The New Yorker, points to what many of us have felt over the decade or so: the internet just isn’t fun any more. This makes me sad, as my kids will never experience what it was like.
Instead of discovery and peer-to-peer relationships, we’ve got algorithms and influencer broadcasts. It’s an increasingly lonely and surveilled landscape. Thankfully, places of joy still exist, but they feel like pockets of resistance rather than mainstream hangouts.
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The Internet today feels emptier, like an echoing hallway, even as it is filled with more content than ever. It also feels less casually informative. Twitter in its heyday was a source of real-time information, the first place to catch wind of developments that only later were reported in the press. Blog posts and TV news channels aggregated tweets to demonstrate prevailing cultural trends or debates. Today, they do the same with TikTok posts—see the many local-news reports of dangerous and possibly fake “TikTok trends”—but the TikTok feed actively dampens news and political content, in part because its parent company is beholden to the Chinese government’s censorship policies. Instead, the app pushes us to scroll through another dozen videos of cooking demonstrations or funny animals. In the guise of fostering social community and user-generated creativity, it impedes direct interaction and discovery.
According to Eleanor Stern, a TikTok video essayist with nearly a hundred thousand followers, part of the problem is that social media is more hierarchical than it used to be. “There’s this divide that wasn’t there before, between audiences and creators,” Stern said. The platforms that have the most traction with young users today—YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch—function like broadcast stations, with one creator posting a video for her millions of followers; what the followers have to say to one another doesn’t matter the way it did on the old Facebook or Twitter. Social media “used to be more of a place for conversation and reciprocity,” Stern said. Now conversation isn’t strictly necessary, only watching and listening. Source: Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore | The New Yorker
As we start the run-up to a General Election in the UK (date still to be announced) the deepfakes will ramp up in intensity. This one is a purported audio clip, but I should imagine in six months' time there will be video clips that fool lots of people.
What with X divesting itself of seemingly all safeguards, there are going to be a lot of people who are fooled, especially those with with poor information literacy skills and a vested interest in believing lies which fit their worldview.
The audio of Keir Starmer was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a pseudonymous account on Sunday morning, the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. The account asserted that the clip, which has now been viewed more than 1.4 million times, was genuine, and that its authenticity had been corroborated by a sound engineer.
Ben Colman, the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender — a deepfake detection business — disputed this assessment when contacted by Recorded Future News: “We found the audio to be 75% likely manipulated based on a copy of a copy that’s been going around (a transcoding).
[…]
Simon Clarke, a Conservative Party MP, warned on social media: “There is a deep fake audio circulating this morning of Keir Starmer - ignore it.” The security minister Tom Tugendhat, also a Conservative MP, also warned of the “fake audio recording” and implored Twitter users not to “forward to amplify it.” Source: UK opposition leader targeted by AI-generated fake audio smear | The Record
I’m sure Charles Feeney was a great guy, and it certainly sounds like he gave the money he amassed to very good causes (and anonymously too!)
The thing to remember when reading these stories, though, is that billionaires shouldn’t exist. They make their money off the back of workers and tax loopholes. I’d challenge anyone who says otherwise to send proof.
As I’ve said many times before, if a regular person wakes up with what they think is a ‘good idea’ but is actually misguided and dangerous, then nothing much is likely to come of it. But a billionaire, by dint of their huge unearned wealth can make it happen. And recently, we’ve had an object lesson in how that can go wrong… (cough Musk cough)
“It’s much more fun to give while you are alive than to give when you are dead,” Feeney said in a biography about him, “The Billionaire Who Wasn’t.”
Feeney set up the Atlantic Philanthropies in 1982, transferring all of his business assets to it two years later, according to the foundation. In 2020, the foundation closed its doors after it said it had successfully given away all of its funds.
In total, the Atlantic Philanthropies made grants totaling $8 billion across five continents — much of it anonymously, the foundation said. Donations supported education, health care, human rights and more. Feeney’s foundation donated to infrastructure in Vietnam, universities in Ireland and medical centers devoted to finding cures for cancer and cardiovascular disease, according to the foundation’s website.
Feeney chose to live the last three decades of his life frugally, his foundation said: He did not own a car or home, preferring to live in a rented apartment in San Francisco, according to the foundation. Source: Charles Feeney, retail entrepreneur who gave $8 billion to charity, dies at 92 | CNN Business
Tantek Çelik reflects on a post by Ben Werdmuller, who wrote a script to be able to quickly follow the blogs of people he follows on Mastodon. As Ben notes in his post, there’s a lot more nuance and depth to be had in reading people’s longer-form thoughts.
One of the reasons that I write here about other people’s work on a daily basis is that it forces me to read and engage with what other people think and believe. That’s helpful in getting me out of my own head, and (probably) makes me less argumentative.
There is also a self-care aspect to this kind of deliberate shift. Ben wrote that he found himself “craving more nuance and depth” among “quick, in-the-now status updates”. I believe this points to a scarcity of thoughtfulness in such short form writings. Spending more time reading thoughtful posts not only alleviates such scarcity, it can also displace the artificial sense of urgency to respond when scrolling through soundbyte status updates.
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There’s a larger connection here between thoughtful reading, and finding, restoring, and rebuilding the ability to focus, a key to thoughtful writing. It requires not only reducing time spent on short form reading (and writing), but also reducing notifications, especially push notifications. That insight led me to wade into and garden the respective IndieWeb wiki pages for notifications, push notifications, and document a new page for notification fatigue. That broader topic of what do to about notifications is worth its own blog post (or a few), and a good place to end this post. Source: More Thoughtful Reading & Writing on the Web | Tantek
Image: Pixabay
This is a fantastic article by Jessica Dai, cofounder of Reboot. What I particularly appreciate is the way that she reframes the fear about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as being predicated upon a world in which we choose to outsource human decision-making and give AIs direct access to things such as the power grid.
In many ways, Dai is arguing that, just as the crypto-bros tried to imagine a world where everything is on the blockchain, so those fearful about AIs are actually advocating a world where we abdicate everything to algorithms.
Who is “we”, and what are “we” seeking to achieve? As of now, “we” is private companies, most notably OpenAI, the one of the first-movers in the AGI space, and Anthropic, which was founded by a cluster of OpenAI alumni.
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To be fair, Anthropic has released Claude’s principles to the public, and OpenAI seems to be seeking ways to involve the public in governance decisions. But as it turns out, OpenAI was lobbying for reduced regulation even as they publicly “advocated” for additional governmental involvement; on the other hand, extensive incumbent involvement in designing legislation is a clear path towards regulatory capture. Almost tautologically, OpenAI, Anthropic, and similar startups exist in order to dominate the marketplace of extremely powerful models in the future.
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The punchline is this: the pathways to AI x-risk ultimately require a society where relying on — and trusting — algorithms for making consequential decisions is not only commonplace, but encouraged and incentivized. It is precisely this world that the breathless speculation about AI capabilities makes real.
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The emphasis on AI capabilities — the claim that “AI might kill us all if it becomes too powerful” — is a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that ignores all of the other if conditions embedded in that sentence: if we decide to outsource reasoning about consequential decisions — about policy, business strategy, or individual lives — to algorithms. If we decide to give AI systems direct access to resources, and the power and agency to affect the allocation of those resources — the power grid, utilities, computation. All of the AI x-risk scenarios involve a world where we have decided to abdicate responsibility to an algorithm. Source: The Artificiality of Alignment | Reboot
When I took delivery of my electric vehicle (EV) earlier this month, I already knew that it would have actually been better for the environment for me to keep hold of our 10 year-old Volvo. Embodied emissions, which are the emissions created through the cars manufacture, are huge.
So it fills me with dismay to find out that tyre dust causes a huge problem in terms of microplastics — and the weight of EVs, and subsequent tyre wear, just makes that worse.
New research efforts are only just beginning to reveal the impact of near-invisible tire and brake dust. A report from the Pew Charitable Trust found that 78 percent of ocean microplastics are from synthetic tire rubber. These toxic particles often end up ingested by marine animals, where they can cause neurological effects, behavioral changes, and abnormal growth.
Meanwhile, British firm Emissions Analytics spent three years studying tires. The group found that a single car’s four tires collectively release 1 trillion “ultrafine” particles for every single kilometer (0.6 miles) driven. These particles, under 100 nanometers in size, are so tiny that they can pass directly through the lungs and into the blood. They can even cross the body’s blood-brain barrier. The Imperial College London has also studied the issue, noting that “There is emerging evidence that tire wear particles and other particulate matter may contribute to a range of negative health impacts including heart, lung, developmental, reproductive, and cancer outcomes.”
This year, Cory Doctorow has been making waves with his, as usual, spot-on analysis of what’s going on in the world. What he calls ‘enshittification’ happens like this:
Interestingly, Germain likens what social networks are doing to what airlines have done: deliberately make things worse and then providing a paid upgrade to relieve your pain.
[…]
This is a radical departure from the business model that ran social media for the past few decades, where you offer your eyeballs to the advertising gods in exchange for free connections to friends and content creators. The old cliche goes that if you’re not the customer, your product. Now, it seems, you’re both.
[…]
It’s a system that creates perverse incentives for companies. Social media isn’t the first industry to charge customers for a more comfortable experience. Airlines, for example, offer the tech business a troubling, anti-consumer model. You’ve probably noticed air travel has gotten a lot more unpleasant. That’s by design. Over the last twenty years, airlines have found ways to charge customers for options that used to be free, including checked bags, seat selection, and priority boarding. Legroom, too, is now a way to squeeze travelers for more cash. By 2014, Consumer Reports found that on average, the roomiest seats in coach were several inches tighter than the smallest seats that airlines dared to offer passengers in the 1990s. Airlines have such a stranglehold on our economy that they can make their customers suffer, on purpose, to encourage you to pay for a little relief.
You can probably expect the same on social media. It’s already happening to a certain extent. On YouTube, the serfs who want free videos are now sometimes treated to two or even three unskippable ads, and incessant popups that promise a better life is just a few dollars away. Source: Welcome to the Age of Paid Social Media | Gizmodo
I was talking to someone yesterday about ‘love languages’ which they hadn’t come across before. It’s easy to dismiss these kinds of things, but I’ve found this approach quite insightful when it comes to identifying people’s needs in relationships.
I’m not going to talk about other people’s love languages, but in my experience most people appreciate expressions of love (whether romantic or platonic) in two out of the five ways. For example, I’m all about words of affirmation (#1) and gifts (#3). That’s what I give out by default because that’s what I like to take in.
The reason the love languages approach is helpful is to realise that others might need something different to what you by default offer them. This particular article on the TED website is interesting because it was written during pandemic lockdowns and so gets creative with ways in which they can be expressed at distance.
In this way, love is a bit like a country’s currency: One coin or bill has great value in a particular country, less value in the countries that border it, and zero value in many other countries. In relationships, it’s essential to learn the emotional currency of the humans we hold dear and identifying their love language is part of it.
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Love languages are a worthwhile concept to become fluent in during this pandemic time — and at this time in the world. Long before COVID arrived on the scene, we were already living through an epidemic of loneliness. Loneliness is not just about being alone; it’s about experiencing a lack of satisfying emotional connections. By taking the time to learn each other’s love languages and then using them, we can strengthen our relationships and our bonds to others. Source: Do you know the 5 love languages? Here’s what they are — and how to use them | TED
It’s massively concerning that, although scientists seem to understand why the earth has been warming due to climate change over the last few decades, they don’t seem to know why there’s all of a sudden been a huge spike.
I just hope it’s not something like methane being released from permafrost, because then we are all completely shafted.
The hottest September on record follows the hottest August and hottest July, with the latter being the hottest month ever recorded. The high temperatures have driven heatwaves and wildfires across the world.
September 2023 beat the previous record for that month by 0.5C, the largest jump in temperature ever seen. September was about 1.8C warmer than pre-industrial levels. Datasets from European and Japanese scientists confirm the leap.
The heat is the result of the continuing high levels of carbon dioxide emissions combined with a rapid flip of the planet’s biggest natural climate phenomenon, El Niño. The previous three years saw La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean, which lowers global temperature by a few tenths of a degree as more heat is stored in the ocean.
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The scientists said that the exceptional events of 2023 could be a normal year in just a decade, unless there is a dramatic increase in climate action. The researchers overwhelmingly pointed to one action as critical: slashing the burning of fossil fuels down to zero. Source: ‘Gobsmackingly bananas’: scientists stunned by planet’s record September heat | The Guardian
Anyone who’s read Montaigne’s Essays will probably be slightly jealous of his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie. The latter tragically passed away at the age of 32, something that Montaine, it seemed, never fully got over. I’ve never had a friend like that. I doubt many men have.
This article from sociologist Randall Collins talks about five different types of friendship. I’ve got plenty of ‘allies’, some ‘backstage intimates’, and ‘mutual-interests friends’. I definitely lack, mainly out of choice ‘fun friends’ and ‘sociable acquaintances’.
It would be interesting to learn more about the history and sociology of friendship. This article goes a little bit into the realm of social media friends, but I’m not sure you can learn much about just studying the medium. That reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote I can’t quite find but goes something along the lines of people always talking about terrorists planning things “over the internet” but would never talk about them planning it “over a cup of tea”.
Backstage intimates: Speaking in privacy; taking care not to be overheard. Don’t tell anybody about this.
Fun friends: Shared laughter, especially spontaneous and contagious. Facial and body indicators of genuine amusement, not forced smiles or saying “that’s funny” instead of laughing. Very strong body alignment, such as fans closely watching the same event and exploding in synch into cheers or curses.
Mutual-interests friends: talking at great length about a single topic. Being unable to tear oneself away from an activity, or from conversations about it.
Sociable acquaintances: General lack of all of the above, in situations where people expect to talk with each other about something besides practical matters (excuse me, can I get by?) Banal commonplace topics, the small change of social currency: the weather; where are you from; what do you do; foreign travels; do you know so-and-so? Answers to “how are you doing?” which avoid giving away information about one’s problems or matters of serious concern. Talking about politics can be conversational filler (when everyone assumes they’re in the same political faction), as often happens at the end of dinner parties when all other topics have been exhausted. Source: FIVE KINDS OF FRIENDS | The Sociological Eye
Image: Pixabay
I can’t quite remember where I came across this article, but I’ve subscribed to the online magazine that it’s from, as it seems interesting.
The article itself explores, in quite a dense way, the psychological and societal aspects of labour, particularly in terms a capitalist framework. The author, Timofei Gerber, who is co-founder and co-editor of Epoché Magazine, argues that workers are alienated from the productive part of their labour. This leads to a cycle of dissatisfaction and unfulfilled potential.
Workers' alienation, he argues, is rooted in societal structures that prohibit the free flow of libidinal, or life-affirming, energy. Society therefore perpetuates a cycle of anxiety, deadness, and aggression, which further disconnects individuals from their creative and productive selves.
Well, I mean, it’s a theory. Reading this article felt a lot like reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, to be honest. A slog. 🥱
This post by author Nick Harkaway was shared by Warren Ellis in his most recent newsletter. It’s something that my wife and I have talked about recently, as she tends to print everything out to read.
I do occasionally, but only for things I want to read really closely. In fact, I’ve got three levels: deep (paper), medium (e-ink), and shallow (screen). Most of the work that I do doesn’t require super-close reading of the text but rather the general gist of what’s going on. I’ve got an A4-sized ereader so it’s easy to put stuff on there.
Previously, I have printed out things. For example, I printed out my doctoral thesis and put it on the windows of the Jisc offices to make tiny corrections when I was almost ready for submission. I think this is entirely OK and normal.
What I really want is a laptop screen where I can switch between a regular screen and e-ink. Something like this.
Holding paper, I notice different things. The work feels different - different tonal issues arise, new sections I need to rewrite. It’s akin to - but different again from - reading a book aloud and hearing the cadences, the unintentional repetitions and homonyms, the blunt force wrongness of an unmodified word. The text is not different, but the experience is, and of course it’s still the paper experience of my book that most people will have. (I think - a couple of my books were bigger sellers as ebooks than paper in some markets, but as far as I know, perhaps even moreso now than a few years ago, paper remains on the throne.)
There are actual science reasons why analogue reading is different - and as the writing process at this point is founded on reading and re-reading, those aspects must be interwoven with the creative edit, irrespective of whether the creative process of itself works differently in the brain depending on the medium in which it is iterated. Whether it’s an inherent quality in the combination of tactile experience and inert text, or whether it’s contingent on my knowledge that digital text is both infinitely editable and subject to sudden interruption when my desktop decides to notify me of something, I find there’s a placidity and a sense of authenticity in the work. I’m always wary of mystifying the tree’s presence in the printed book or the long inheritance of paper, but - be it a societal form or something more fundamental - paper feels more “in the world”. Source: The Print | Fragmentary
I use a lot of Google products. I’m typing this on a laptop on which I’ve installed ChromeOS Flex, I use Google Workspace at work, I’ve got a Google Assistant device in every room of our house, and now even my car has an infotainment system with it built in.
But I do take some precautions. I don’t use Google Search. I turn off my web history, watching history on YouTube, opt out of personalisation, and encrypt my Chrome browser sync with a password.
This article doesn’t surprise me, because Google’s core business is advertising. It’s still creepy though.
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
Why would Google want to do this? First, the generated results to the latter query are more likely to be shopping-oriented, triggering your subsequent behavior much like the candy display at a grocery store’s checkout. Second, that latter query will automatically generate the keyword ads placed on the search engine results page by stores like TJ Maxx, which pay Google every time you click on them. In short, it’s a guaranteed way to line Google’s pockets. Source: How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet | WIRED
I grew up in an ex-mining town, surrounded by ex-mining villages. At one point in my teenage years, I can distinctly remember wondering why people continued to live in such places once the reason for its existence had gone?
Now I’m an adult, of course I realise the many and varied economic, social, and emotional reasons. But still, the question remains: why do people live in places that don’t support a flourishing life?
One of the reasons that politicians are turning up the anti-immigration at the moment is because they’re well-aware of the stress that our planet is under. As this article points out, even if we reach net zero by 2050, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere means that some places are going to be uninhabitable.
That’s going to lead not only to international migration, but internal migration. We need to be preparing for that, not just logistically, but in terms of winning hearts and minds.
Outside the United States and Canada, the World Bank predicts that climate change will compel as many as 216 million people to move elsewhere in their countries by 2050; other reports suggest that more than one billion people will become refugees because of the impacts of a warming planet on developing countries, which may exacerbate or even precipitate civil wars and interstate armed conflict.
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The extraordinary pressure that continued international and domestic climate migration will impose upon state resources and social goods like schools, hospitals and housing is difficult to fathom. Over the past year, city and state governments in the U.S. have feuded over the distribution of migrants stemming from the Southern border, with New York Mayor Eric Adams declaring that the current migration wave will “destroy” the city.
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The stark fact is that the amount of carbon dioxide already amassed in the atmosphere all but assures that certain zones will become uninhabitable by the end of the century, regardless of whether global greenhouse gas emissions reach net zero by 2050. If factories cannot operate at full capacity due to life-threatening climate conditions, periodic grid failures and difficult-to-replace labor shortages over the next two decades — and these challenges reverberate throughout their surrounding economies — the output of the renewables sector will falter and stall projects to decarbonize businesses, government agencies and households. Source: The U.S. Government Should Push People To Move To Climate Havens | Noema
This blog post, which I discovered via Hacker News, is about ultimatums around ‘return to office’ mandates/ultimatums. But it’s also a primer to only allow people to treat you the way you want to be treated.
People who abuse any power they have over you aren’t worth respecting and definitely aren’t worth hanging around. Although sometimes it’s difficult to realise it, the chances are that you’re bringing the talent to the table, which is why they acting in a way fueled by insecurity.
Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum.
If your employer tells you, “Move to an expensive city or resign,” your best move will be, in the end, to quit. Notice that I said, ‘in the end’.
It’s perfectly okay to pretend to comply to buy time while you line up a new gig somewhere else.
That’s what I did. Just don’t start selling your family home or looking at real estate listings, and definitely don’t accept any relocation assistance (since you’ll have to return it when you split).
Conversely, if you let these assholes exert their power over you, you dehumanize yourself in submission. Source: Return to Office Is Bullshit And Everyone Knows It | Dhole Moments
I mentioned a few weeks ago how researchers have been trying to electrically stimulate the vagus nerve, which is now thought to help treat everything from anxiety to depression.
In this study, researchers from the University of Auckland found that the vagus nerve, plays a significant role during exercise. Contrary to the prevailing understanding that only the ‘fight or flight’ nervous system is active during exercise, this study shows that activity in the vagus nerve actually increases. This helps the heart pump blood more effectively, supporting the body’s increased oxygen needs during exercise.
Interestingly, especially for people I know who have heart failure, they also identified that the vagus nerve releases a peptide which helps dilate coronary vessels. This allows more blood to flow through the heart.
Currently, exercise science holds that the ‘fight or flight’ (sympathetic) nervous system is active during exercise, helping the heart beat harder, and the ‘rest and digest’ (parasympathetic) nervous system is lowered or inactive.
However, University of Auckland physiology Associate Professor Rohit Ramchandra says that this current understanding is based on indirect estimates and a number of assumptions their new study has proven to be wrong. The work is published in the journal Circulation Research.
“Our study finds the activity in these ‘rest and digest’ vagal nerves actually increases during exercise,” Dr. Ramchandra says.
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There is a lot of interest in trying to ‘hack’ or improve vagal tone as a means to reduce anxiety. Investigating this was outside the scope of the current study. Dr. Ramchandra says we do know that the vagus mediates the slowing down of heart rate and if we have high vagal activity, then our hearts should beat slower.
“Whether this is the same as relaxation, I am not sure, but we can say that regular exercise can improve vagal activity and has beneficial effects." Source: Vagus nerve active during exercise, research finds | Medical Xpress
Next month, I embark on my fourth postgraduate qualification: an MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. I also believe that alternative credentials such as Open Badges are valuable. That’s because the answer to an ‘either/or’ question is usually ‘yes/and’.
So I have sympathy with this article which talks about potentially going too far in discouraging people from going to university. What’s missing from this piece, as usual with these things, is that Higher Education isn’t just about earning power. It’s about expanding your mind, worldview, and experiences.
I got involved with Open Badges 12 years ago because I wanted my kids to have the option of going to university, rather than it being table-stakes for a decent job. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re a lot closer than we used to be. It’s a delicate balance, because I don’t want a liberal education to be the preserve of a wealthy elite.
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Despite the bad vibes around higher education, the fastest-growing occupations that do not require a college degree are mostly low-wage service jobs that offer little opportunity for advancement. Negative public sentiment might dissuade some people from going to college when it is in their long-run interest to do so. The potential harm is greatest for low- and middle-income students, for whom college costs are most salient. Wealthy families will continue to send their kids to four-year colleges, footing the bill and setting their children up for long-term success.
Indeed, highly educated elites in journalism, business, and academia are among those most likely to question the value of a four-year degree, even if their life choices don’t reflect that skepticism. In a recent New America poll, only 38 percent of respondents with household incomes greater than $100,000 said a bachelor’s degree was necessary for adults in the U.S to be financially secure. When asked about their own family members, however, that number jumped to 58 percent. Source: The College Backlash Is Going Too Far | The Atlantic
Image: Good Free Photos
Andrew Curry links to Amy Edmondsen’s new book about ‘intelligent failure’. She’s also got a recorded talk from the RSA on the same topic which I’ve queued up to watch.
Although some people who have sat through teacher in-service training days may beg to differ, there’s no such thing as wasted learning. It’s all grist to the inspiration mill, and I’m always surprised at how often insights are generated between unexpected overlaps.
This, though, isn’t about serendipity, but rather about goal-directed behaviours to reach an outcome. Which pre-supposes, of course, that we’re working towards a goal. In these times of rolling catastrophe, it’s worth remembering that having goals is something that used to be normal.
So it is interesting to see Amy Edmondsen writing about “intelligent failure” on the Corporate Rebels blog. She has just published a book on this theme.
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The first part of this is to know that there are different kinds of failures. The set of things that are included in “intelligent failures” does not include failures that happened because you couldn’t be bothered. But it does include failures that happen as a result of complexity or bad luck.
So by working hard to prevent avoidable failures, they are able to embrace the other ones.
Edmondsen has developed a model from her research about intelligent failure which the Corporate Rebels turned into one of their distinctive graphics. Here are her four criteria:
It (1) takes place in new territory (2) in pursuit of a goal, (3) driven by a hypothesis, and (4) is as small as possible. Because they bring valuable new information that could not have gained in any other way, intelligent failures are praiseworthy indeed. Source: Energy | Failing - by Andrew Curry
I can count on the fingers of no hands the number of times I’ve fallen asleep watching a film at home. I have, however, fallen asleep watching one at the cinema.
This is perhaps for three reasons. First, I usually wear contact lenses, but not when I’m in the cinema. Second, because my wife and I can’t seem to watch a film at home without pausing it half a dozen times. Third, because I’d rather read than watch a film.
So, yeah, this article isn’t for me. But I’m sharing it because I can’t really get into the mindset of someone for whom this is a problem.
Maybe your schedule is hectic, but you still want to catch every twist and turn in the Glass Onion movie. Or perhaps your significant other’s date-night selection seems like a snoozefest, and you’re attempting to roll credits on Morbius. Whatever your reason is to stay awake, keep the following advice in mind the next time you’re streaming something at home. Source: How to Stop Falling Asleep on the Couch During Movies | WIRED
Friend and collaborator Bryan Mathers recommended this episode of The Rest is Politics: Leading to me. While I’m a regular listener to the main podcast, which features only Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, I hadn’t previously bothered with the ones where they interview others.
This one with Yuval Noah Harari is great. It’s the second part of a two-part interview. In the first, recorded in August, Harari talks about the situation in Israel. In this second one, he zooms out a bit to talk about politics more generally, AI, and society.
The thing that struck me, about 5-10 minutes in, was his point about the left and right of politics not making sense any more. That’s something that others have said before. But his analysis was fascinating: the right has largely abandoned the role of being guardians of tradition to weaponise ‘truth’, which has led to the left being in the awkward position of custodian. That’s why everything feels topsy-turvy.
(also, I’m really pleased to have discovered pod.link to share podcast episodes in a non-platform-specific way as easily as song.link)
(also also, I found out about a podcast search engine call Listen Notes recently!)
Remember NFTs? This article in The Guardian will help remind you of the heady days of early 2022 when digital images of monkeys were apparently extremely valuable. That article ends with a question: “what will the next NFT be? When will it drop? How much money will normal people end up spending on it?”
Here’s one answer: owning a slice of your favourite song. Or perhaps a popular song. Or an up-and-coming song. It’s essentially applying capitalism at the very smallest level possible, and treating cultural artifacts as commodities.
The article below in WIRED discusses a platform which offers this as a service. It’s a terrible idea on many levels, not least because, as we’ve seen recently, AI-generated music is tearing fandoms apart. I’ll sit this one out, thanks.
A new music royalties marketplace, Jkbx (pronounced “jukebox”), launched this month and plans to officially open for trading later this year. It has filed an application with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and is waiting for notice that the SEC has qualified its offerings. As long as that goes according to plan, Jkbx—god, why no vowels?—will allow fans to buy “royalty shares,” or fractionalized portions of royalties, fees, and other income associated with a particular song. Prices are within reach of regular people. One share of composition royalties for Beyoncé’s “Halo,” for example, is $28.61. You could also buy a slice of the song’s sound recording royalties for the same price.
[…]
Jkbx is debuting with some big-name slices, and is led by a guy with a good track record. “They are very sophisticated,” Round Hill Music founder and CEO Josh Gruss says. “The real deal.” Others agree. “We think they are going to be successful,” Hipgnosis Songs CEO and founder Merck Mercuriadis says.
Still, plenty of industry analysts and insiders view Jkbx, and the larger world of royalty trading, warily. “I think there are going to be very modest levels of return,” says Serona Elton, a music industry professor at the University of Miami.
“There is skepticism about how good of an alternative investment strategy something like this is,” musician and data analyst Chris Dalla Riva says.
“I don’t understand why people keep trying to spin this idea up,” adds producer and music tech researcher Yung Spielburg. “I just don’t get it.” Source: The Next Meme Stock? Owning a Slice of Your Favorite Song | WIRED
Cory Doctorow is one of my favourite people on the entire planet. I’ve heard him speak in person and online on numerous occasions. I met him a couple of times while at Mozilla, and he’s even recommended swimming pools in Toronto to me when I visited. (He’s a daily swimmer due to chronic back pain.)
His new book, which I’m saving to read for my next holiday, is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. In this interview as part of promoting the book, he talks about how we’ve ended up in a world without real competition in the technology marketplace. Essential reading, as ever.
Over time, we went from an internet where tech companies more or less had their users’ backs, to an internet where tech companies are colluding to take as big a bite as possible out of those users. We do not have fast companies anymore; we have lumbering behemoths. If you’ve started a fast company, it’s probably just a fake startup that you’re hoping to get acqui-hired by one of the big giants, which is something that used to be illegal.
As these companies grew more concentrated, they were able to collude and convince courts and regulators and lawmakers that it was time to get rid of the kind of interoperability, the reverse engineering that had been a feature of technology since the very beginning, and move into a new era in which no one was allowed to do anything to a tech platform that their shareholders wouldn’t appreciate. And that the government should step in to use the state’s courts to punish anyone who disagrees. That’s how we got to the world that we’re in today. Source: Cory Doctorow: Silicon Valley is now a world of ‘lumbering behemoths’ | Fast Company
There is, or rather was, a tree that symbolised the North East of England. Standing at a dip in the ground along Hadrian’s Wall called ‘Sycamore Gap’, it’s a tree I’ve visited many times with friends and family. Last year, when I walked the wall in 72 hours, it was a familiar touchstone.
Now the iconic 200 year-old tree, which featured in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, is gone. Felled by a 16 year-old in an act of wanton vandalism. On a World Heritage Site. Some people just want to watch the world burn.
It didn’t take long for someone to rename the place on Google Maps where the tree used to stand to ‘Sycamore Stump’. Hopefully they will build some kind of memorial to it. I do think it’s difficult for someone not from the region to understand just how important things like this are to one’s identity.
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Photographs from the scene on Thursday showed the tree was cut down near the base of its trunk, with the rest of it lying on its side.
Northumbria Police said the teen was arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage. He was in police custody and assisting officers with their inquiries.
[…]
“This is an incredibly sad day,” police Superintendent Kevin Waring said. “The tree was iconic to the North East and enjoyed by so many who live in or who have visited this region.” Source: ‘Incredibly sad day’: Teen arrested in England after felling ancient tree | Al Jazeera
Image: Oli Scarff / Agence France-Presse (taken from NYT article)
I don’t know how many people reading this are vegans or vegetarians. I was a pescetarian from October 2017 to January 2020 and then, since then, stopped eating fish too.
The reason I stopped eating meat was because of an article about the number of chickens that are killed each day. You can say that the actual death is painless, but they’re reared to have terrible lives, and many of them are electrocuted to death because it’s the cheapest method.
I’m sorry if this is shocking to you, but it’s even more shocking to the chickens. Eating meat is bad for your long-term health, bad for the environment, and ethically dubious. I’m not particularly interested if you agree right now, but I’d like you consider whether you’re on the right side of history.
My plan is to eventually turn vegan. I’ve replaced most of my milk consumption, including in tea and coffee, with oat milk.
This number is so large that I find it impossible to comprehend. What helps me to make these numbers more relatable is to turn them from the weight of meat to the number of animals and from the yearly total to the daily number. This is what I have done in the graphic below. It shows how many animals are slaughtered on any average day.
About 900,000 cows are slaughtered every day. If every cow was 2 meters long, and they all walked right behind each other, this line of cows would stretch for 1800 kilometers. This represents the number of cows slaughtered
If you believe that the slaughter of animals causes them to suffer and attribute even a small measure of ethical significance to their suffering, then the moral scale of this reality is immense. Source: How many animals get slaughtered every day? | Our World in Data
Audrey Watters, formerly the ‘Cassandra’ of edtech, is now writing about health, nutrition, and fitness technologies at Second Breakfast. It’s great, I’m a paid subscriber.
In this article, she looks at the overlap between her former and current fields, comparing and contrasting coaches and educators with algorithms. While I don’t share her loathing of ChatGPT, as an educator and a parent I’d definitely agree that motivation and attention is something to which a human is (currently) best suited.
And then (ideally) she’ll say, “If you don’t want to do them, you don’t have to.” And (ideally), she’ll ask you what’s going on. Maybe you feel like shit that day. Maybe you don’t have time. Maybe they hurt your hamstrings. Maybe you’d like to hear some options — other exercises you can do instead. Maybe you’d like to know why she prescribed this exercise in the first place — “it’s a unilateral exercises, and as a runner,” she says, “we want to work on single-leg strength, with a focus on your glute medius and adductors because I’ve noticed, by watching your barbell squats, that those areas are your weak spots.” This is how things get “personalized” — not by some massive data extraction and analysis, but by humans asking each other questions and then tailoring our responses and recommendations accordingly. Teachers and coaches do this every. goddamn. day. Sure, there’s a training template or a textbook that one is supposed to follow; but good teachers and coaches check in, and they switch things up when they’re not really working.
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If we privilege these algorithms, we’re not only adopting their lousy recommendations; we’re undermining the expertise of professionals in the field. And we’re not only undermining the expertise of professionals in the field, we’re undermining our own ability to think and learn and understand our own bodies. We’re undermining our own expertise about ourselves. (ChatGPT is such a bad bad bad idea.) Source: Teacher/Coach as Algorithm | Second Breakfast
Granted it’s been over a decade, but when I worked at a university I had to be on the ‘disabled’ register due to my migraines. That meant my line manager could make accommodations such as being sat next to a window so the fluorescent lights didn’t trigger me.
Almost everyone I know has some kind of medical condition which affects their work to a greater or lesser extent. These are the things that we used to hide, until we realised (perhaps for the first time during the pandemic) that we’re all just temporarily abled.
This letter in The Guardian is a response to an article about a minister setpping down due to chronic migraines. I don’t get 15 or more a month, as she does, but I probably average 3-4 and, because they add up, it’s imperative that I have flexible working conditions. But then, shouldn’t we all?
But while it is valuable that chronic migraines have been given some media attention, it is also troubling that the message is, unfortunately, that those with such conditions do not have equal value and should quit if they can’t manage the job – a message that many people living with migraines and other long-term conditions and disabilities will be familiar with, whatever their role or employer.
Managing work, life and migraines takes more than the “patience at times” that Davison thanks her colleagues for. It needs recognition, respect and a commitment from employers to prioritise the health of workers and support them to work with the condition, not drop back because of it.
Anna Martin Oxford Source: People living with migraines need better support from employers | The Guardian
There’s a film starring Matt Damon called Elysium from 2013 in which the wealthy live on a man-made space station in luxury, while the rest of the population live on a ruined Earth. With the latest announcement about a new huge oilfield being opened in the North Sea, the obscene desire for global elites to put profit before planet is clear for all to see.
As we hurtle towards this scenario, many have realised that there is no longer any link between meaningful work, a decent salary, and a fulfilling life.
But during lockdown in 2020, James had an epiphany about what he valued in life when reading the book Bullshit Jobs by the anthropologist David Graeber. “He talks a lot about how jobs that provide social utility are generally pay-poor while the inverse are paid more,” James says.
James felt he was working doggedly – but not necessarily either generating public good or building a stable financial life. “It felt futile … You can work really hard and you’re still not going to get ahead,” he says.
“Salaries and housing costs are so mismatched at this point that you would really need to jump ahead in your career to be able to buy in parts of the country. Not that [owning property] is the be-all and end-all, but it’s kind of a foundation to having financial stability.”
He now focuses on his life, putting his phone on aeroplane mode while doing activities such as hiking, reading and watching films. “I still value work, I’m very committed to my position. But I’ve just realised that this myth a lot of millennials were told – graft, graft, graft and you’ll always get what you want – isn’t necessarily true,” James says. “It’s a reprioritisation.”
Social mobility in the UK is at its worst in more than 50 years, a recent study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found, with children from poor households finding it harder than 40 years ago to move into higher income brackets. The IFS said gifts and inheritances from older generations were becoming more important to household incomes. Source: ‘It felt futile’: young Britons swap career-driven lives for family and fun | The Guardian
You’ve probably seen some of these already. Someone discovered that if you use the generator for QR codes but feed it something different, it can create words from images.
There are lots more examples at knowyourmeme and you can try creating your own using KREA.
“What happened there was that this user discovered that if they used the QR Code ControlNet but instead of feeding it a QR code, they fed it some other black-and-white patterns, they could create nice optical illusions,” said Passos. “You can now send a conditioning image and the model blends in a pattern that satisfies that while still making a coherent image at the same time.” Source: AI-Generated ‘Subliminal Messages’ Are Going Viral. Here’s What’s Really Going On | VICE
I attended a Navigatr webinar at lunchtime today where they shared this graphic which underscores the importance of encouraging badge earners to share their achievements on social networks.
What I appreciated about the webinar was the way in which the team explained the importance of preparing for and then following up the issue of the badge to ensure that it’s claimed.
Liza Donnelly is a cartoonist for the New Yorker. In this article, which is an output from some preparatory work for a talk she’s preparing, she talks about how the best cartoons work.
I’ve had the privilege of working with Bryan Mathers over the last decade and it really is a fascinating process. In fact, he’s just delivered a bunch of artwork for the work we’re doing around Open Recognition. Check it out here!
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Bottom line: story in the best New Yorker cartoons tell us a story about the characters that are in the drawing, and about ourselves. This is why we love them so much—they are fun, entertaining and are about us. Source: Storytelling In Drawing | Seeing Things
Social networks are surveillance systems. Loyalty cards are surveillance systems. AI language models are surveillance systems.
We live in a panopticon.
Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Whittaker explained her perspective that AI is largely inseparable from the big data and targeting industry perpetuated by the likes of Google and Meta, as well as less consumer-focused but equally prominent enterprise and defense companies. (Her remarks lightly edited for clarity.)
“It requires the surveillance business model; it’s an exacerbation of what we’ve seen since the late ’90s and the development of surveillance advertising. AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model,” she said. “The Venn diagram is a circle.”
“And the use of AI is also surveillant, right?” she continued. “You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’ These are ultimately surveillance systems that are being marketed to those who have power over us generally: our employers, governments, border control, etc., to make determinations and predictions that will shape our access to resources and opportunities.” Source: Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’ | TechCrunch
I spent my lunchtime packaging up my beloved PlayStation 5. I’m going to send it to my brother-in-law and his family until my son heads off to university. This directly impacts me and my extra-curricular activities, but I’m at my wits end.
He can’t control his use of it, sadly. Combined with his use of a smartphone, I feel like I’ve failed as a parent despite all of the things I’ve tried. I wrote my doctoral thesis on digital literacies, for goodness sake.
Ben Werdmuller’s at the other end of the spectrum with his son. I wish him the best of luck.
It’s obvious that he’ll get into computers early: he’s the son of someone who learned to write code at the same time as writing English and a cognitive scientist who does research for a big FAANG company. Give him half a chance and he’ll already grab someone’s phone or laptop and find modes none of us knew existed — and he’s barely a year old. The only question is how he’ll get into computers.
[…]
He’s entering a very different cultural landscape where computers occupy a very different space. Those early 8-bit machines were, by necessity, all about creation: you often had to type in a BASIC script before you could use any software at all. In contrast, today’s devices are optimized to keep you consuming, and to capture your engagement at all costs. Those iPhones those kids were holding are designed to be addiction machines. Source: Parenting in the age of the internet | Ben Werdmuller
Getting people to understand your ideas is a difficult thing. That’s why it’s been so gratifying to work at various times with Bryan Mathers over the last decade. We humans are much better at processing visual inputs than deciphering text.
That being said, as Derek Thompson shows in this article, you have to begin with the realisation that simple is smart. It’s much easier to just write down what’s in your head that do so in a way that’s easy for others to understand.
In some ways, this reminds me of my work on ambiguity, which was a side-product of the work I did on my doctoral thesis. It’s also a good reminder that one of the best uses that most people can make of AI tools such as ChatGPT is to simplify their work.
As I’ve written several times before here on Thought Shrapnel, society seems to act as though the giant, monolithic, hugely profitable porn industry just doesn’t… exist? This despite the fact it tends to be a driver of technical innovation. I won’t get into details, but feel free to search for phrases such as ‘teledildonics’.
So this article from the new (and absolutely excellent) 404 Media on a venture capitalist firm’s overview of the emerging generative AI industry shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. As a society and as an industry, we don’t make progress on policy, ethics, and safety by pretending things aren’t happening.
As the father, seeing this kind of news is more than a little disturbing. And we don’t deal with all of it by burying our head in the sand, shaking our head, or crossing our fingers.
[…]
What I can tell you without a doubt by looking at this list of the top 50 generative AI websites is that, as has always been the case online and with technology generally, porn is a major driving force in how people use generative AI in their day to day lives.
[…]
Even if we put ethical questions aside, it is absurd that a tech industry kingmaker like a16z can look at this data, write a blog titled “How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?” and not come to the obvious conclusion that people are using it to jerk off. If you are actually interested in the generative AI boom and you are not identifying porn as core use for the technology, you are either not paying attention or intentionally pretending it’s not happening. Source: 404 Media Generative AI Market Analysis: People Love to Cum
I’ve spent the last 12 years working in the ecosystem around Open Badges, which provides an alternative accreditation system. It didn’t come out of thin air, and before this there was plenty of work around e-portfolios. Next up we’ve got Verifiable Credentials which allow for lots of things, including endorsement.
Frustratingly, over the past couple of decades, people several steps removed from actual jobs markets and education systems decide to weigh in. Inevitably, they use the metaphor closest to hand, which tends to be a ‘passport’.
This not only is the wrong metaphor, but it diverts money and attention from fixing some of the real issues in the system. I’d suggest that these are at least threefold:
Businesses, unions, tertiary institutions and students are among those the federal government says will be consulted about the initiative.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the goal was to make it easier for employers to find highly-qualified staff and for workers to have their qualifications recognised.
“We want to make it easier for more workers in more industries to adapt and adopt new technology and to grab the opportunities on offer in the defining decade ahead of us,” Chalmers said. Source: National Skills Passport: Government aims to connect workers and employers | SBS News
One thing I’ve learned spending over a decade thinking about Open Badges and alternative credentials is that hiring is broken. Although there are mitigations and workarounds — some of which I’ve implemented when hiring a team and helping others do so — the whole thing is a dumpster fire.
This article by Paul Fuhr discusses the horror show that is job hunting in the age of platforms such as Indeed. He does a great job of showing how automated and dehumanising the whole hiring process is. Platforms are more focused on user engagement than genuinely aiding job seekers; applicants are reduced to mere data points.
Not only that, but the lack of human-centricity to the whole thing fails to accommodate those with non-linear careers while simultaneously trivialising the job search process. Unsurprisingly, he’s calling for root-and-branch reform of the current job market. I can’t help but think that badges and alternative credentials can make the whole thing more transparent and fair, moving away from automated metrics.
Searching for a steady job is a disheartening and depressingly tedious affair, but it doesn’t have to be. If I’m qualified for anything at the moment, though, it’s being qualified to weigh in on the contemporary job-search experience. I know what it is, what it isn’t, what it pretends to be, why it no longer works, and what needs to change. And thanks to a year-plus of trying to find consistent work, it’s no longer about connecting me with the job of my dreams — it’s about connecting me with my dream of simply having a job.
[…]
Machine learning, AI, automation, yadda yadda yadda. I get it. I understand the “why” of automating the hiring process; I even think it can be a helpful (jargon alert) “arrow in the quiver” for HR. I can’t even imagine a single HR specialist being tasked to locate the right candidate from a huge field of applicants for one job, let alone fifteen jobs at once. That’s like finding a needle in a stack of needles. It’d be paralyzing.
That said, hiring managers and job seekers have arrived at a truly dangerous intersection. Employers have allowed automation to creep in and govern so much of the HR process that it threatens to ignore the whole…well, you know, human part of it all. And some companies insist on doubling-down on this façade; I’ve visited a shocking number of sites that pretend to have an actual human person ready to chat with you (certainly not a bot!), as if they’re impossibly waiting 24/7 to answer your questions.
We’re at a maddeningly mindless moment when it comes to finding employment, but it’s one that could be repaired with some maddeningly simple ideas. For starters, just bring back some humans. Robots can parse your past and distill you down into data, but they’ll never make a genuine connection or get a sense of you are. Also, simplicity works both ways: it benefits the applicant as much as an HR specialist. Source: Why Resumes Are Dead & How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market | Paul Fuhr
This article by Antonia Malchik reflects on her personal journey moving back to her hometown in Montana. It focuses on her deep sense of gratitude for the natural environment and community. She discusses the annual Gathering of the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, celebrating the retirement of the last remaining oil lease in the area, which is significant for the Blackfeet Nation.
The part of the article in which I’m most interested is towards the end: a reflective moment by a creek. She writes about the importance of being present in nature and contemplating one’s place and responsibilities in the world. That feeling of being in and of nature after a day’s walking, feeling quite emotional. It stirs my soul just thinking about it.
The creek ran cold across my bare feet, its sound and movement and chilly reminders of snowmelt all I really need in this world to ground myself in what’s real, and what matters. I sat there letting my feet go numb and the sound run through me, September’s late afternoon sunlight filtering through the aspen trees to glance off the water.
I don’t even know what to call that sound—a trickle, a ripple, a slow rush?
Sometimes the right answer is an action. Sometimes it’s a change in policy, or in culture. And sometimes it’s simply being, sitting there by a creek reminding yourself what it feels like to be alive, in a place you love. It’s asking questions of belonging and responsibility, and struggling with your own place in the world.
That sound is all of life to me. I could have sat there forever, grown cold and hungry, but I never for a moment would have felt alone. Source: Sometimes there’s a right answer, sometimes you sit by a creek, and sometimes they’re the same thing | On The Commons
The article from the Mozilla Foundation surfaces into the human decisions that shape generative AI. It highlights the ethical and regulatory implications of these decisions, such as data sourcing, model objectives, and the treatment of data workers.
What gets me about all of this is the ‘black box’ nature of it. Ideally, for example, I want it to be super-easy to train an LLM on a defined corpus of data — such as all Thought Shrapnel posts. Asking questions of that dataset would be really useful, as would an emergent taxonomy.
Therefore, questions of accountability and regulation need to take both phases seriously and employ different approaches for each phase. To further engage in discussion about these questions, we are conducting a study about the decisions and values that shape the data used for pre-training: Who are the creators of popular pre-training datasets, and what values guide their work? Why and how did they create these datasets? What decisions guided the filtering of that data? We will focus on the experiences and objectives of builders of the technology rather than the technology itself with interviews and an analysis of public statements. Stay tuned! Source: The human decisions that shape generative AI: Who is accountable for what? | Mozilla Foundation
Like the author of this article, I love a good map. Whether it’s trekking across hills and mountains with an OS map, or looking through historical maps, there’s something enchanting about understanding territories.
The thing is, though, that maps are literally projections. They leave things out and therefore have to be interpreted. If the maps are out of date, or are being used in a way that’s anachronistic, that leads to a huge problem.
As a History teacher, I used to teach WWI but didn’t know that General von Schlieffen, the Chief of the German General Staff, was obsessed with Hannibal and the Battle of Cannae. Apparently he used stories and maps of how it played out to inform his strategy. The problem was that, not only did it happen a couple of millennia beforehand, but it probably didn’t even play out that way.
[…]
In her book The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman argues that the memory of Cannae, which was passed down through a succession of military histories until it became a virtual obsession of strategists in the 19th century, helped push the world into an unimaginable catastrophe.
It did so by offering up a model of a “battle of annihilation” that Germany’s war planners believed they could unleash on France. At the head of these planers was General von Schlieffen, the Chief of the German General Staff. The map of Cannae haunted Schlieffen’s dreams.
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Cannae was no vague inspiration. It was a direct model for Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France.
[…]
As the historian Martin Samuels pointed out in his article “the Reality of Cannae,” there is no archaeological evidence for the battle. Nor are there first-hand sources of any kind. Everything we know derives from accounts written sixty years or more after Cannae itself. Suffice to say, when Samuels dug into these sources, he found as many questions as answers. The detailed maps of movements at Cannae that decorated military strategy manuals for hundreds of years, in other words, were largely fanciful. Samuels calls Cannae “the most quoted and least understood battle” in history.
The simplicity of a historical map — the clear labels, the sharp edges, and above all the reduction of thousands or millions of people into abstract symbols — is a big part of why they’re so beguiling. But it’s also why they lead us astray.
[…]
It is sometimes said that the map is not the territory. The map is not the historical argument, either.
Instead, maps are a great way to pose questions about history. They are best approached as a way in: an entry-point rather than an ending. They offer one path toward confronting the enormous complexity of “real” history — the kind made by individual people, on the decidedly imperfect and unmap-like terrain of the world. Source: Historical maps probably helped cause World War I | Res Obscura
Underwater archaeologists have discovered a sunken temple off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, filled with artefacts related to the god Amun and the goddess Aphrodite. The temple was part of the ancient port city of Thonis-Heracleion, which sank due to a major earthquake and tidal waves.
When we discover the remnants of civilizations buried under the sea and in other places it does make me think about humans in the future discovering what we leave behind. What will they think?
The temple, which partially collapsed “during a cataclysmic event” during the mid-second century B.C., was originally built for the god Amun; it was so important, pharaohs went to the temple “to receive from the supreme god of the ancient Egyptian pantheon the titles of their power as universal kings,” according to a statement from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM).
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Also at the site divers found underground structures supported by “well-preserved wooden posts and beams” that dated to the fifth century B.C., they wrote in the statement.
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The sanctuary also held a cache of Greek weapons, which could indicate that Greek mercenaries were in the region at one time “defending the access to the Kingdom” at the mouth of the Nile’s westernmost, or Canopic, branch, the researchers said in the statement. Source: Sunken temple and sanctuary from ancient Egypt found brimming with ‘treasures and secrets’ | Live Science
There was a time, about a decade ago, where although I was based from home, I’d be travelling pretty much every week for work. I was abroad once a month at least.
These days, perhaps with the pandemic as a catalyst, I’m slightly more wary of travelling. It’s probably also a function of age and awareness of how routines affect my body. As an historian, though, I’ve always been amazed by those people who journeyed long distances.
This post by an academic historian of medicine and the body outlines some of the dangers such travellers faced. Pretty amazing, when you think about it.
First was the risk of accident or death on the journey. In the seventeenth century even relatively short distances on horseback or in a carriage carried dangers. Falls from horses were common, causing injury or even death.
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Travel by sea, even around local coasts, carried its own obvious risks of storm and wreck. So common and widely acknowledged were the vagaries of sea travel that a common reason for making a will in the early modern period was just before embarking on a voyage.
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Once abroad, too travellers were at the mercy of a bevy of dangers, from unfamiliar territories and extreme landscapes to harsh weather and climate, their safety contingent on the quality of their transport and the reliability of their guides.
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Even ‘foreign’ food and drink could be risky. Thomas Tryon’s Miscellania (1696) noted the dangers of ‘intemperance’ and of misjudging the effects of climate upon the body in regard to drinking alchohol [sic] Source: The Health Risks of Travel in Early-Modern Britain | Dr Alun Withey
Today, I’ve been doing a UCL short course. As we were coming back from a break, we were discussing the lack of ‘embodiedness’ in virtual interactions. This reminded me of experiments with different platforms that WAO did during the pandemic.
This post by Alja from Tethix is prompted by a challenge-based learning platform that I took part in last year. They’re focusing on tech ethics (hence the name) and their approach was great. It was just that the tools got in the way to some extent.
I think, after reading this, it’s time to experiment again with some of the tools mentioned in the post. Sometimes you do need a sense of play and feel like you’re connected in ways that go beyond small boxes on a screen.
Mural turned out to be a great tool for collaboration and live session guidance, but it didn’t really convey a sense of place. Clicking on a link in a Mural to visit the next leg of your journey just doesn’t feel like traveling, especially when you’re trapped in the same little Zoom box during every live session.
So we started exploring tools that could help us convey a sense of space and discovered Gather and WorkAdventure, among others. These tools offer two-dimensional virtual collaborative spaces where you can walk around a space with your avatar and have proximity-based conversations by using your microphone and camera.
[…]
You might be thinking: this is cute and all, but is this Archipelago all games and play? Well, playfulness is a big part of why we’re experimenting with these game-like worlds; we know that play helps us learn better and can unlock our imagination. But there’s much more to it than just millennial nostalgia for pixel graphics.
As already mentioned, Gather allows us to build a sense of place, both inside rooms and between them. And a sense of place helps with learning and memory encoding. Historical records show ancient Greeks using the method of loci or memory palaces, a technique for improving memory encoding and retrieval, and humans have been developing other mnemonic techniques based on spatial relationship for much longer than that. We’re physical beings, uniquely equipped to understand space, whether physical or represented by pixels. Source: Welcome to the Tethix Archipelago | Tethix
On 1st October, I’ll be transitioning the Thought Shrapnel newsletter to Substack. More about that here. What’s interesting is the ecosystem that’s being created there — including Substack Notes, which is where I came across this post.
I’ve several things to say about this hand-drawn map of the ‘social media archipelago’. First, as the top commenter on the post notes, it’s similar to a classic xkcd cartoon from 2007 and shows how much the landscape has changed.
Second, Chelsea Troy quite rightly points out that we’ve got a Twitter-shaped hole in the internet, which people are filling with either private communities (Slack/Discord), the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.), or Twitter-like things (Bluesky, etc.)
What I think they’re missing is.. Substack Notes. For someone who loves reading and writing, it’s full of interesting people sharing thoughtful things. You can find my notes here.
I present to you, The Social Media Archipelago.
Whether you’re lost among the Musky Mountains or the Dunk Swamps of Twitterland, or in the selfie-obsessed Forest of Mirrors on the Isle of Insta, I hope this chart can be a helpful guide on your journey. Never again be stranded among the bleak deserts of Facebook, no interesting content in sight. Never again be sucked into the maelstrom of the Doomscroll, forever locked among the whirlpools of cheap dopamine hits.
Instead, look toward the lone peak of innocent hopes, reminiscent of the heady days of the early internet, where healthy conversation and good faith debate may yet flourish. Look to the terra novalis, known to the early cartographers as the mythical land of Substackus Notum.
Or in the common tongue — Substack Notes.
(it was a slow day at work ok) Source: Note by M. E. Rothwell on Substack
Thankfully, there’s no-one calling me back into the office. But this post is about people who are being recalled — as well as those working in sub-optimal remote settings.
This post suggests that the phrase “this isn’t working” should be viewed as an invitation for dialogue rather than a threat, arguing that open communication is crucial for things inadequate in the workplace.
We know that everyone’s sick of constantly redesigning the rules of work. There’s this revisionist nostalgia for, in some quarters, 2019. And in others, 2021. We know that some of you have built systems here in 2023 that are working for you, and you would like them to please just stay put for a goddamned minute. We get that. But when someone tells you that those systems aren’t working for them, shouting them down won’t give you the peace and quiet you want.
[…]
By all means, read what other orgs are doing. Maybe there are things you can learn from what Apple does, or Google, or Smuckers. But there’s no shortcut around the conversation. Every sales person, fundraiser, marketer, product leader, and designer will tell you the same thing. You have to talk to people to know if you’re actually reaching them. To know if any of your solutions actually solve the problem. Source: Sorry I’m getting kicked out of this room | Raw Signal Group
Posts like this one by Venkatesh Rao are like catnip to me. He explores the concept of the ‘real world’ as a construct shaped by collective human beliefs and values, arguing that it is, of course, anthropocentric and inherently absurd.
All worlds created by humans, such as fandoms and nationalisms, have more or less consequence in shaping the ‘real world’. In other words, there are constructs which serve to help shape the meta-construct. This, in essence, is a shared cognitive space for humans.
Well worth reading if you’re in the mood to question the nature of reality, explore the power of collective belief, and ponder the transient nature of what we consider to be ‘real’. It’s a complex examination of how human perception shapes the world we live in, and how that world, in turn, shapes us.
Of the few hundred that are significant, perhaps a couple of dozen matter strongly, and perhaps a dozen matter visibly, the other dozen being comprised of various sorts of black or gray swans lurking in the margins of globally recognized consequentiality.
This then, is the “real” world — the dozen or so worlds that visibly matter in shaping the context of all our lives, with common knowledge of such shaping constituting a non-trivial part of the visibly mattering. The consequentiality of the real world is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy of its own reality. Something that can play the rule of truth. For a while.
[…]
The real world, in other words, is a fragile, unreliable, dubious, borderline incoherent, unsatisfying house of cards destined to die. Yet, while it lives and reigns, it is an all-consuming, all-dominating thing. A thing that can seem extraordinarily real compared to any more fragile, value-based private delusions we may harbor. To the point that we typically refer to it unironically as the real world, to be contrasted with self-indulgent fantasies, and characterize belief in it as pragmatism rather than just a grittier delusion. Source: This is the New Real World | Venkatesh Rao
Image: Marcus Spiske
I came across this via fellow Sunderland AFC supporter Andrew Curry’s Just Two Things newsletter. We also share similar political views, so I share his delight that this journal article from a right-wing thinktank does the opposite of what they were evidently setting out to achieve.
The article presents findings from a global survey on attitudes towards capitalism, revealing that pro-capitalist views are rare and mostly found in six countries. Bizarrely, and seemingly clutching at straws, the research found anti-capitalist views often correlate with conspiracy thinking and negative attitudes towards the rich.
You’re not paranoid if they’re out to get you, and it’s not a conspiracy if capitalism really does favour the 0.1%.
What is it exactly that bothers people about capitalism? If you look at the survey’s overall conclusions, it is – in this order – primarily the opinion that:
Not surprisingly, anti-capitalism is most pronounced among those on the left of the political spectrum and the strongest pro-capitalists are to be found to the right of centre. But while in some countries the formula is ‘the more right-wing, the more supportive of capitalism’, there are more countries in which moderate right-wingers are somewhat more supportive of capitalism than those on the far right of the political spectrum. Source: Attitudes towards capitalism in 34 countries on five continents | Economic Affairs
I came across this via Dense Discovery, which is one of a number of additional newsletters to which I would recommend Thought Shrapnel readers subscribe.
In this article, Erin Remblance shows how modern lifestyles, particularly in wealthy nations, have led to a loss of human connection and an increase in mental health issues. She suggests that the shift from community-oriented activities to individualistic, consumer-driven behaviour has not only harmed our well-being but also contributed to the climate emergency.
The solution? Returning to simpler, more sustainable ways of living that focus on human connection and creativity. By becoming creators rather than mere consumers we can improve our mental health and simultaneously benefit the planet.
[…]
Reducing our consumption is of course important for the health of the planet, but what if one way to do this is by becoming producers, or creators, ourselves? Rediscovering what our human-energy – an abundantly available energy we seem to be using increasingly less of – can achieve, something we once innately drew upon, now buried deep within us as fossil-fuelled energy has overtaken our lives. There’s a clear link here to actions that will mitigate climate change: walking, cycling, growing our own food, and other low-tech solutions such as repairing and fostering community that encourages “social connections … rather than fostering the hyper-individualism encouraged by resource-hungry digital devices.”
[…]
We are not supposed to live like this, and it shows. We can see it in the deterioration of mental and physical health of people in so called ‘wealthy’ nations, in the exploitation of people in the Global South, and we can see it in the planetary-wide ecological crisis we face. What if, in trying to heal ourselves, we also begin to heal the planet? Because, in a wonderful turn of events, it would seem that what is good for us, is good for the planet too. Source: We are not supposed to live like this | Erin Remblance
This was cited in something I read last week and I thought it was worth making it easy for me to re-find. There are plenty of philosophers, including Aristotle, who talk about the difference between the way we treat animate and inanimate objects, but none put it so eloquently as Chuang Tzu.
And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,
Even though he be a bad-tempered man
He will not become very angry.
But if he sees a man in the boat,
He will shout at him to steer clear.
If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,
And yet again, and begin cursing.
And all because there is somebody in the boat.
Yet if the boat were empty.
He would not be shouting, and not angry. Source: The Empty Boat by Chuang Tzu | Daily Zen
Although I’ve alluded to talking to plants in the title for this post, the interesting thing here is that research shows they can sense vibrations made by insects like caterpillars. This allows the plants to prepare for an attack by producing defensive chemicals.
Some research suggests that plants can even detect the sound of water, which could have implications for sewer systems. The findings open up possibilities for using sound-based interventions in agriculture, such as drones equipped with speakers to warn crops of impending pest attacks.
The researchers then exposed Thale cress—the plant biologist’s version of the laboratory mouse—to the recorded vibrations while no caterpillars were actually present. Later, they put real caterpillars on the plants to see if exposure had led them to prepare for an insect attack. The results were striking. Leaves that had been exposed had significantly higher levels of defensive chemicals like glucosinolates and anthocyanins, making them much harder for the caterpillars to eat. Leaves on control plants that had not been exposed to vibrations showed no such response. Other sorts of vibration—caused by the wind, for instance, or other insects that do not eat leaves—had no effect.
[…]
The research may have practical consequences, too. “Drones armed with speakers and the right audio files could warn crops to act when pests are detected but not yet widespread,” says Dr Cocroft. Unlike chemical pesticides, sound waves leave no toxic residue. With the help of weather forecasts, the system could even be used to prepare crops for cold snaps.
[…]
Farmers monitor the health of their crops by eye. (Mosaic virus, for instance, is so named because of the mottled pattern produced on the leaves of suffering plants.) That can be hard to do properly over an entire field. But if plants are broadcasting auditory indicators of distress, then wiring a field with microphones might help farmers keep an ear out for trouble. Source: Plants don’t have ears. But they can still detect sound | The Economist
I’ve worked from home for the last eleven years. For the last nine years, I’ve lived near the middle of a market town in the north east of England. You wouldn’t believe the amount of noise.
As respondents in this Hacker News thread comment, you kind of get used to it, and also work around particularly loud noise. However, the struggle is real and now that my wife and I both work from home it’s a factor in us moving.
I’d second the opinion of the commenter I’ve quoted below about getting headphones with at least two levels of noise cancellation. I bought some Sony WH-CH720N cans when they started building behind my home office and they’ve been a godsend.
When I’m vising my parents in the suburbs… its generally quiet, but that one leaf blower 4 doors down or the one garbage truck crawling down the block suddenly becomes the only thing I can focus on. The noises are infrequent and jarring when they occur.
When I’m at home in my city apartment, the background noise is truly constant - it forms a canvas, nothing really jumps out and therefore the level of what it takes to make a distraction is a lot higher.
My practical advice is to explore headphones with passive noise isolation instead of active noise cancelling. The passive isolation is pretty foolproof, even with sudden or extreme changes in background noise content that the active noise cancelling sometimes takes a moment to adjust to (or perhaps try something like working in a coffee shop for an hour to get the other extreme and reset: write emails where distraction is more OK, come home to the relative quiet of the home office for focus time. I’ve also found even a change of scenery can get me into the zone regardless of what is going on environmentally) Source: Ask HN: How do you deal with never ending noise and distraction WFH? | Hacker News
Image: Pexels
I’d be surprised if ‘shrinkflation’ isn’t word of the year for 2023. For those unaware, it’s the reason why prices for some products have stayed the same while their size decreases.
This article is about Carrefour, one of Team Belshaw’s favourite overseas supermarkets. They’ve added warnings on shelves to “shame” brands. The thing is, as this thread from Mario Zechner shows, it’s not as if supermarkets aren’t in the price fixing game. Also, as I wrote about recently, stores are essentially panopticons.
While I’m on the subject, you might be interested in this crowdsourced website which tracks the differences in size of packs of everything from toothpaste to shortbread biscuits.
It has slapped price warnings on products from Lindt chocolates to Lipton iced tea to pressure top consumer goods suppliers Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever to tackle the issue in advance of much-anticipated contract talks.
[…]
Carrefour has marked 26 products in its stores in France with the labels, which say: “This product has seen its volume or weight fall and the effective price from the supplier rise.”
For example, Carrefour said a bottle of sugar-free peach-flavoured Lipton iced tea, produced by PepsiCo, shrank to 1.25 litres (0.33 gallon) from 1.5 litres, resulting in a 40% effective increase in the price a litre. Source: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands | The Guardian
I read Evgeny Morozov’s book To Save Everything, Click Here a few years ago and found it frustrating. It’s about the “folly of technological solutionism” so, while I agreed with the broad argument, I thought he presented it in an annoying way.
Here, Morozov is interviewed about his podcast The Santiago Boys, which explores into Project Cybersyn, an ambitious project from 1971 to 1973 under Salvador Allende’s Chilean government. The project aimed to use cybernetics to efficiently manage state-owned enterprises but faced various internal and external challenges, including U.S. interference and internal political tensions.
What’s useful in this interview is the discussion of “dark tech,” highlighting the technological vulnerabilities and challenges faced by socialist projects like this. Morozov argues that the legacy of Project Cybersyn offers valuable lessons for contemporary discussions on socialism, technology, and governance. He emphasises the need for technological sovereignty and a nuanced approach to management and planning. So yes, we could learn a thing or two.
Evgeny Morozov: Project Cybersyn—short for “cybernetic synergy”—aimed to aid the Chilean state in managing the enterprises being nationalized by the Unidad Popular government. A significant hurdle was the lack of sufficient managerial staff to oversee them. Allende’s opponents, including the U.S. ambassador, were making things even harder by encouraging managers and other professionals to flee the country.
As with most science and technology projects, the path toward Cybersyn was not linear. It didn’t emerge as a culmination of some strategic plan to use computers in management; the whole process was more chaotic—and even its name came at a later stage. It all started with an effort to bring some external expertise to Chile. Fernando Flores, a high-ranking member of the Allende administration, felt that he needed help in dealing with all these nationalized companies. So he sought the guidance of the British management consultant Stafford Beer, even going to London to meet him. That encounter resulted in Beer agreeing to go to Chile. This collaboration eventually blossomed into what we now recognize as Project Cybersyn.
[…]
In the end, Cybersyn was a tragedy—and a drama. This project started in an optimistic, even utopian political environment. The Santiago Boys worked off the assumption that Allende would be allowed to govern, and they would be able to build a different economy in Chile. These assumptions were quite unrealistic. If you know anything about how ITT, the CIA, local industrialists, the government of Brazil, and other forces were trying to prevent Allende from even coming to office, you would never think that such optimism was warranted—especially when Allende won the election with only one-third of the popular vote and relied on a very unstable coalition of six parties. Source: Liberty Machines and Dark Tech | Dissent Magazine
Well this is promising. Researchers have identified a critical weakness in COVID-19 in its reliance on specific human proteins for replication. The virus has an “N protein” which needs human cells to properly package its genome and propagate. Apparently, blocking this interaction could prevent the virus from infecting human cells.
Right now, the most effective treatment for COVID is Paxlovid, which is only effective within three days of infection. This new discovery could lead to medications useful at all stages of infection and potentially pave the way for a new class of antivirals useful against other viruses like flu, RSV, and Ebola.
“In the wrong location, the virus cannot infect us,” said Quanqing Zhang, co-author of the new study and manager of the proteomics core laboratory at UCR’s Institute for Integrative Genome Biology.
[…]
This paper shows that COVID depends on SUMOylation proteins, just as the flu does. Blocking access to the human proteins would allow our immune systems to kill the virus.
Currently the most effective treatment for COVID is Paxlovid, which inhibits virus replication. But patients need to take it within three days following infection. “If you take it after that it won’t be so effective,” Liao said. “A new medication based on this discovery would be useful to patients at all stages of infection.” Source: Scientists uncover COVID’s weakness | UC Riverside News
The report from Tactical Tech focuses on Digital Media Literacy (DML), exploring its complexities and the challenges associated with how it’s assessed. It delves into the role of teachers and educators, hopefully once and for all dismissing the notion of “digital natives” and “digital non-natives”. The report emphasises that both teachers and students bring unique perspectives to digital learning environments: teachers may offer critical thinking skills, while students may be more comfortable with digital tools.
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT don’t allow you to get certain information. Think things like how to make a bomb, how to kill people and dispose of the body. Generally stuff that we don’t want at people’s fingertips.
Some things, though, might be prohibited because of commercial reasons rather than moral ones. So it’s important that we know how to theoretically get around such prohibitions.
This website uses the slightly comical example of asking an LLM how to take ducks home from the park. Interestingly, the ‘Hindi ranger step-by-step approach’ yielded the best results. That is to say that prompting it in a different language led to different results than in English.
My son’s now old enough to get ‘loyalty cards’ for supermarkets, coffee shops, and places to eat. He thinks this is great: free drinks! money off vouchers! What’s not to like? On a recent car journey, I explained why the only loyalty card I use is the one for the Co-op, and introduced him to the murky world of data brokers.
In this article, Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic about the extensive data collection by retailers to personalise marketing. This not only predicts but also influences consumer behaviour, raising ethical concerns about the erosion of privacy and democratic ideals. Bogost argues that this data-driven approach shifts the power balance, allowing companies to manipulate consumer preferences.
You might be thinking, Who cares? If stores can offer the best deals on the most relevant products to me, then let them do it. But you don’t even know which products are relevant anymore. Customizing offerings and prices to ever-smaller segments of customers works; it causes people to alter their shopping behavior to the benefit of the stores and their data-greedy machines. It gives retailers the ability, in other words, to use your private information to separate you from your money. The reason to worry about the erosion of retail privacy isn’t only because stores might discover or reveal your secrets based on the data they collect about you. It’s that they can use that data to influence purchasing so effectively that they’re rewiring your desires.
[…]
Ordinary people may not realize just how much offline information is collected and aggregated by the shopping industry rather than the tech industry. In fact, the two work together to erode our privacy effectively, discreetly, and thoroughly. Data gleaned from brick-and-mortar retailers get combined with data gleaned from online retailers to build ever-more detailed consumer profiles, with the intention of selling more things, online and in person—and to sell ads to sell those things, a process in which those data meet up with all the other information big Tech companies such as Google and Facebook have on you.“Retailing,” Joe Turow told me, “is the place where a lot of tech gets used and monetized.” The tech industry is largely the ad-tech industry. That makes a lot of data retail data. “There are a lot of companies doing horrendous things with your data, and people use them all the time, because they’re not on the public radar.” The supermarket, in other words, is a panopticon just the same as the social network. Source: You Should Worry About the Data Retailers Collect About You | The Atlantic
Shortly before Daft Punk’s album Discovery was released, I managed to download a version of it which must have been exfiltrated from the studio. It was subtly different to the version that was released and, to be honest, I preferred it. Sadly, I’ve long since lost the MP3s, and the chance of me finding anything other than the official version these days is minimal.
This article is about the preservation of music, movies, and books. What copyright maximalists don’t realise is that piracy is actually amazing at ensuring that cultural diversity flourishes and is preserved. It’s definitely worth a read.
(It’s also interesting to me how this intersects what I posted earlier about AI-generated music and fandom, because both intersect with ‘official’ narratives and our current understanding of copyright.)
The fearful mood intensifies whenever politics enters the picture. When books by Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and other long-dead authors were reedited to reflect what are said to be “contemporary sensitivities,” many e-books were automatically updated even for readers who had bought them long before. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, several streaming services, unable to stop the abusive policing that set off the unrest, decided instead to edit or eliminate TV episodes where characters appeared in blackface. (This wasn’t an anti-racist gesture so much as a cargo-cult copy of an anti-racist gesture—an elaborate imitation built without figuring out the functions of the component parts—and so it mostly affected shows that had presented blackface with obvious disapproval.) Several songs with words that might offend listeners have gone missing from Spotify or (as with Lizzo’s “Grrrls,” which originally included the term spaz) were replaced with new versions.
Every time news breaks of one of these deletions, a refrain echoes online: Buy physical media! The internet is too impermanent, the argument goes: The real cultural cornucopia was in the outside world.
As is often the case with nostalgia, this leaves out a lot. We still have access to far more media than we did in the days before the mass internet. Yes, this includes that politically controversial material: It takes less than a minute to dig up the unredacted version of “Grrrls” on YouTube (just search for lizzo grrrls spaz), and it’s not hard to find material that was withdrawn from circulation long before the internet era. (I’m told the ’90s were a less politically correct time than today, but back then you needed to track down a bootleg DVD or videotape if you were curious about Song of the South. Now it’s posted on the Internet Archive.) It’s too easy to take the internet’s riches for granted and to forget how much was inaccessible just a few decades ago.
But while we shouldn’t want to return to those pre-web days, there’s something to be said for that online-offline hybrid space where my old tape-trading network dwelled—if not as a world to recreate, then as a way to think about cultural preservation. And there’s something to be said for the bootleggers and pirates. Whether or not they mean to do it, they’re salvaging pieces of our heritage. Source: Online Outlaws Preserve the History of Music, Movies, and Books | Reason
I confess to only having watched one of the top 10 films on this list, which is put together mainly be critics and people who work in the film industry. Must rectify that.
On the other hand, I have watched seven of the top 10 films on the IMDB top 250 list…
The Sight and Sound poll is now a major bellwether of critical opinion on cinema and this year’s edition (its eighth) is the largest ever, with 1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics each submitting their top ten ballot. What has risen up the ranks? What has fallen? Has 2012’s winner Vertigo held on to its title? Find out below. Source: The Greatest Films of All Time | BFI
If you haven’t discovered AI-generated songs by your favourite artists, then you’re missing a trick. Try I’m a Barbie Girl by Johnny Cash, for example, or Skyfall by Freddie Mercury. Amazing stuff.
This article is about the fandom around artists such as One Direction and Harry Styles, who are paying hard-earned real money for ‘leaks’ which may or may not be AI-generated music. No-one can tell the difference.
The controversy has turned into a days-long crowdsourced investigation and communitywide obsession, in which no one is really sure what’s real, what’s fake, whether they’re being scammed, or who or what made the songs that they’re listening to.
Over the last few weeks, a flurry of Harry Styles and One Direction snippets—which are short samples of a track designed to prove legitimacy so people will pay of the full thing—have begun popping up on YouTube, TikTok, and, most importantly, Discord, where they are being sold. The problem is no one can tell which, if any, of the songs are real, including AI-analysis companies who listened to the tracks for 404 Media. Source: The Specter of AI-Generated ‘Leaked Songs’ Is Tearing the Harry Styles Fandom Apart | 404 Media
I’m a fan of Venkatesh Rao’s writing, and in this post he explores what we mean by ‘saving’ when we talk about ‘saving the world’. To do this, he uses a 2x2 matrix, categorising people’s motivations along two axes: biological scope and temporal scope. He identifies four types of “worlds” people aim to save: Civilisations, represented by ethnocentrists; Technological Modernity, represented by cosmopolitans; Modern Nations, represented by patriots; and the World as Wildernesses, represented by Gaians.
Rao himself identifies as a “cosmopolitan with Gaian tendencies,” advocating for a world that is rich in both contemporary technological potentialities and natural history. He argues that the focus should not be on saving the world but on “rewilding” it so that it becomes self-sustaining and doesn’t require saving.
But apparently, a significant portion of humanity disagrees with me on this front. Many are attracted to the idea that their world-to-save can expand to become all that is; replacing a messy, illegible pluralism with a gloriously insipid and legible monoculture that reigns supreme with a firm, dead hand. I suspect the very intellectual fragility of these worlds is part of their appeal, much as fragility is part of the appeal of house-of-cards games.
[…]
For a cosmopolitan with Gaian tendencies, to save the modern world is to rewild and grow the global web of already slightly wild technological capabilities. Along with all the knowledge and resources — globally distributed in ways that cannot be cleanly factored across nations, civilizations, and other collective narcissisms — that is required to drive that web sustainably. And in the process, perhaps letting notions of civilization — including wishful notions of regulating and governing technology in “human centric” ways — fall by the wayside if they lack the vitality and imagination to accommodate technological modernity. Source: What we seek to save when we seek to save the world | Ribbonfarm
I really enjoyed this essay by David Schurman Wallace in The Paris Review about being distracted while writing. It reminded me of a much shorter version of one my favourite books about writing: Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer.
Wallace delves into the complexities of distraction, using Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet as a lens to explore how our pursuits, whether intellectual or mundane, often become a chain of distractions. He argues that distraction isn’t necessarily a negative state but could be an essential part of the human condition, a byproduct of our ceaseless quest for knowledge and meaning.
In this moment of mild delusion, I’m distracted. I’ve always wanted to write an essay about distraction, I think. Add it to the laundry list of incomplete ideas I continue to nurse because some part of me suspects they will never come to fruition, and so will never have to be endured by readers. These are things you can keep in the drawer of your mind, glittering with unrealized potential. In the top row of my bedroom bookshelf is a copy of Flaubert’s final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet. Something about it seems appropriate, though I’m not sure exactly what. I pluck it down. Source: In This Essay I Will: On Distraction | The Paris Review
The website of the guy behind this post is a bit too heavy on the self-marketing for my liking, but I did like the diagram in this post about developing rather than ‘finding’ your niche.
The diagram is contrasted with the kind of Ikigai approach you usually see which, he points out, doesn’t tell you where to actually start.
You need to ignore the negative voices of self-doubt, and you need to ignore feelings of “imposter syndrome.”
Next, you need to begin exploring the odd thing(s) you find fascinating. I call this phase, the “Zone of Fascination.”
Next, you must find a congregation of people who share your irrational fascination. For myself, I found this in r/Zettelkasten.
After this, you need to exit the congregation and go deeper than anyone else in a specific area. You must undergo three challenges. Think of these as “quests” in a hero’s journey. Source: It’s Not about Finding Your Niche, It’s about Developing Your Niche | Scott P. Scheper
I listened to a fascinating episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast while out running over the weekend. The focus was on a new book by Will Storr called The Status Game and he was full of insights.
What is The Status Game? It’s our primate propensity to perpetually pursue points that will provide a higher level of regard among the people who can (if we provoked such a response) take those points away. And deeper still, it’s the propensity to, once we find a group of people who regularly give us those points, care about what they think more than just about anything else.
In the interview, we discuss our inescapable obsession with reputation and why we are deeply motivated to avoid losing this game through the fear of shame, ostracism, embarrassment, and humiliation while also deeply motivated to win this game by earning what will provide pride, fame, adoration, respect, and status. Source: The game we can’t escape, the psychology behind our perpetual drive to pursue status | You Are Not So Smart
This short piece by Drew Austin reminds me of a couple of links I posted yesterday about Non-places and TikTok’s effect on migration. There are so many quotable parts, including that when it comes to social media, “the only place left to go is outside”.
What I think is interesting is how online and offline used to be seen as completely separate. Then we realised the impact that offline life had on online life, and now we’re seeing the reverse: Instagram, TikTok, etc. having a huge impact on the spaces in which we exist offline.
[…]
The illusion that the internet and “real life” are two separate universes has been thoroughly dispelled by now, but the nature of their interaction is complex and evolving. The social media era seems to have already peaked, as I predicted at the end of last year, calling our present moment a “saturation point of cultural self-consciousness that represents the fullest possible synthesis of reality and our digitally mediated perception of it.” The metaverse concept was dead on arrival; there’s nowhere left to go but outside. And that’s what we’re doing: TikTok is the social network for the internet’s decadent era, embodying the worldview that becoming viral content is the highest calling, the end state to which everything aspires and strives. You visit Italy not to enjoy yourself but to help Italy fulfill its destiny as a meme. Source: I’m Beginning to See the Light | Kneeling Bus
This article by Lan Nguyen Chaplin, a professor of marketing at a prestigious business school, reflects my own experience. Those jobs I’ve thought were ‘big’ and ‘important’ have been the ones that have drained me of energy, made me sad, and generally changed me for the worse.
Instead, as Chaplin says, the important thing is to align your work your values and personal strengths. This (eventually) allows you to transform what you do into a sustainable, balanced, and purposeful career. Sometimes, though, you have to know what you’re willing to tolerate and what you’re not, which can involve going precipitously close to the fire.
Instead, I jotted down research ideas on bar napkins, replied to emails when everyone else was offline, and had a growing portfolio of projects in development. I didn’t know how to disconnect without feeling unproductive. For hours, I sat with my laptop in isolation, working on research that might never be published.
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The moment you have found your dream job is the moment you have stopped growing, evolving, and finding new ways to experience joy in your role. Remember, you were hired because you offer something the organization is missing. They need change. They need you to bring your whole self to work, and that means doing things differently with the added flare that is you. A job that inspires you and gives you the space you need to be your full self is the dreamiest job out there. Source: What You Should Chase Instead of a Dream Job | Ascend
If you understand how LLMs such as ChatGPT work then it’s pretty obvious that there’s no way “it” can “know” anything. This includes being able to spot LLM-generated text.
This article discusses OpenAI’s recent admission that AI writing detectors are ineffective, often yielding false positives and failing to reliably distinguish between human and AI-generated content. They advise against the use of automated AI detection tools, something that educational institutions will inevitably ignore.
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OpenAI’s new FAQ also addresses another big misconception, which is that ChatGPT itself can know whether text is AI-written or not. OpenAI writes, “Additionally, ChatGPT has no ‘knowledge’ of what content could be AI-generated. It will sometimes make up responses to questions like ‘did you write this [essay]?’ or ‘could this have been written by AI?’ These responses are random and have no basis in fact.”
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As the technology stands today, it’s safest to avoid automated AI detection tools completely. “As of now, AI writing is undetectable and likely to remain so,” frequent AI analyst and Wharton professor Ethan Mollick told Ars in July. “AI detectors have high false positive rates, and they should not be used as a result." Source: OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work | Ars Technica
I’m a big fan of Guy Debord’s work but have never read that of Marc Augé, who came up with the concept of ‘non-places’. These are spaces like airports and hotels where human interaction is largely transactional, leading to a form of psychic isolation.
This article outlines Augé argument that to counteract the dehumanising effects of these non-places, individuals should engage in active observation, storytelling, and even talking to strangers. In this way we essentially become ‘supermodern flaneurs’, restoring a social element to these otherwise isolating spaces.
We live in “a world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions” — from “hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps”. In non-places, exchange between human beings is transactional: you buy a sandwich, or a massage, or a train ticket. Speech is replaced by text; signs direct behaviour, instead of people, giving instructions and advertising products. We are, therefore, isolated, in “a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others”. Source: Non-places are robbing us of life | UnHerd
Kukes, Albania is one of the poorest cities in Europe. Since the end of pandemic lockdowns, the city has seen a sharp rise in the number of Albanians, especially men, seeking asylum in the UK.
This article is a real eye-opener as to what’s going on, and talks about everything from TikTok propaganda to criminal gangs and cannabis houses. Well worth a read, especially to show the other side of the “small boats” rhetoric.
By 2022, Albanian criminal gangs in Britain were in control of the country’s illegal marijuana-growing trade, taking over from Vietnamese gangs who had previously dominated the market. The U.K.’s lockdown — with its quiet streets and newly empty businesses and buildings — likely created the perfect conditions for setting up new cannabis farms all over the country. During lockdown, these gangs expanded production and needed an ever-growing labor force to tend the plants — growing them under high-wattage lamps, watering them and treating them with chemicals and fertilizers. So they started recruiting.
Everyone in Kukes remembers it: The price of passage from Albania to the U.K. on a truck or small boat suddenly dropped when Covid-19 restrictions began to ease. Before the pandemic, smugglers typically charged 18,000 pounds (around $22,800) to take Albanians across the channel. But last year, posts started popping up on TikTok advertising knock-down prices to Britain starting at around 4,000 pounds (around $5,000).
People in Kukes told me that even if they weren’t interested in being smuggled abroad, TikTok’s algorithm would feed them smuggling content — so while they were watching other unrelated videos, suddenly an anonymous post advertising cheap passage to the U.K. would appear on their “For You” feed. Source: The Albanian town that TikTok emptied | Coda Story
As I know from personal experience, walking a long way by yourself is hard work, both mentally and physically. As this article points out, doing so as a woman is even harder, so good on Lea Page for not only walking a thousand miles across Europe, but writing about how the biggest danger is… men.
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One other time, while walking along a river just outside Colle di Val D’Elsa in Tuscany, I felt that familiar clench of panic. This river, a glacial robin’s-egg blue, meandered and tumbled gently. The gorge was not deep, but a lonely wooded path just outside a city struck me as the perfect place for an ambush. Clearly, men exist everywhere, so it made no sense to be frightened in that one particular place. I knew that, statistically, women are safer out in the world than they are at home, but in that moment, knowledge felt like thin protection. Unable to shake my feelings of dread, I called my husband, and we talked about inconsequential things so I could hear his sleepy voice and keep putting one foot in front of another.
And that’s what women are really talking about when we talk about being afraid. We are talking about men. But there is, I learned, a difference between being afraid and being unsafe. Source: I walked 1,000 miles alone through Europe – and learned that fear is the price of freedom | The Guardian
As the world heats up, humans are going to need to cool down. The use of air conditioning already accounts for nearly 20% of electricity used in buildings worldwide, so this report highlights the urgent need for higher efficiency standards in cooling technologies to mitigate the strain on energy systems and reduce emissions.
Apparently, effective policies could halve future energy demand and cut costs by $3 trillion by 2050. More importantly than the financial impact, I guess, more efficient air conditioning means that less hot air is dumped into urban environment, which tends to create heat islands (and affects weather patterns).
Over the next three decades, the use of ACs is set to soar, becoming one of the top drivers of global electricity demand. A new analysis by the International Energy Agency shows how new standards can help the world avoid facing such a “cold crunch” by helping improve efficiency while also staying cool. Source: The Future of Cooling | IEA
This is a perfect example of the kind of sustainable design and long-term thinking we lose when we ignore indigenous knowledge.
In Western Australia, Marri trees, known as Gnaama Boorna in the Menang language, have been pruned by Aboriginal people for generations to collect and store rainwater. The ancient practice involves shaping the trees into a bowl-like structure, making them vital water sources in areas where water is scarce, and they are often found in ceremonial areas or high hills.
Less ‘rules’ than notes, this post by Ryan Holiday (himself a prolific author) is worth reading. I like the part where he turns the tables, “You say you don’t have time to read but what does the screen time app on your phone say? What does your calendar say?"
Along the way, Holiday emphasises the importance of a systematic approach over speed reading, advocates for physical books, note-taking, and seeking wisdom rather than mere facts. He also encourages readers to share impactful books with others. (You can check out my reading list and reviews here.)
How do you read so much? What’s the secret?
The answer is not “I’m a speedreader.” As I’ve written before, speed reading is a scam. The answer is that I have a system, a process that helps me be a productive reader. It’s not my system exactly, as I’ve taken many strategies from history’s greatest readers. Nor is this a system designed around speed or quantity. Reading is wonderful in and of itself, why would I try to rush through it? No, I try to do it well. I try to enjoy it. Source: These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life | RyanHoliday.net
As a philosopher, historian, and educator by training, and a technologist by profession, this initiative really hits my sweet spot. The image below shows how, even before AI and digital technologies, altering the public record through manipulating photographs was possible.
Now, of course, spreading misinformation and disinformation is so much easier, especially on social networks. This series of posts from the Content Authenticity Initiative outlines ways in which the technology they are developing can be prove whether or not an image has been altered.
Of course, unless verification is built into social networks, this is only likely to be useful to journalists and in a court of law. After all, people tend to reshare whatever chimes with their worldview.
Even in these early days of the AI revolution, we are seeing stunning advances in generative AI. The technology can create a realistic photo from a simple text prompt, clone a person’s voice from a few minutes of an audio recording, and insert a person into a video to make them appear to be doing whatever the creator desires. We are also seeing real harms from this content in the form of non-consensual sexual imagery, small- to large-scale fraud, and disinformation campaigns.
Building on our earlier research in digital media forensics techniques, over the past few years my research group and I have turned our attention to this new breed of digital fakery. All our authentication techniques work in the absence of digital watermarks or signatures. Instead, they model the path of light through the entire image-creation process and quantify physical, geometric, and statistical regularities in images that are disrupted by the creation of a fake. Source: From the darkroom to generative AI | Content Authenticity Initiative
I’ve long said that no-one really knows what knowledge work looks like. It’s easy to see whether or not someone is digging a hole in the ground, but it’s much more difficult to see whether the work that someone is doing on a computer is ‘productive’.
This is, I think, partly because ‘productivity’ is something that is best thought about for things that can be systematised and made routine. A lot of knowledge work is fundamentally creative, and so quantitative metrics are meaningless. Who cares if you’ve made a million pull requests if they’re all to change a single character?
This article discusses the complexities of assessing productivity in various fields, the issues with current interviewing processes, and suggests that future evaluations may become more tied to tangible accomplishments rather than arbitrary metrics. That’s presupposing, of course, that hierarchical evaluations are even necessary.
For more fuzzy fields, like product management or marketing or design, it becomes even more hand-wavey. Some fields tend to depend on getting other roles to execute better, but you can’t go rewind history and try things with a different PM to see if things would have been better. Same with design.
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If you give the most productive employee more work, presumably they’d be justified in asking for higher compensation? After all, they are driving greater outcomes for you. Would you be comfortable paying it?
For example, would you pay a 3x more productive designer 3x the fully loaded cost of the average designer? If 10x engineers truly exist, why do pay scales intra company not cover a 10x spectrum?
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My suspicion is that, like in other fields where performance matters and is financially rewarded, there will be a surge in our capacity to measure and evaluate real-life work performance. Compensation will become more closely tied to tangible accomplishments rather than arbitrary levels or seniority. Interviews will transition to be more real-world scenarios, perhaps within the customer’s actual codebase, addressing a genuine problem the customer faces—possibly even compensating the interviewee for their time. Source: Why is it so hard to measure productivity? | fractional.work
Image: Kelly Sikkema
I can’t remember the last time I searched Google. It’s been around six years since I used DuckDuckGo as my main search engine. Which is weird, because people use ‘google’ for searching the web as they do ‘hoover’ for vacuuming cleaning.
This article explores Google’s history and its impact on SEO, content creation. it’s written by Ryan Broderick, author of Garbage Day, a newsletter to which I subscribe. He charts the rise of alternative platforms like Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and suggests that Google’s era of influence may be waning.
For two decades, Google Search was the largely invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time since Google’s launch, a world without it at the center actually seems possible. We’re clearly at the end of one era and at the threshold of another. But to understand where we’re headed, we have to look back at how it all started.
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Twenty-five years ago, at the dawn of a different internet age, another search engine began to struggle with similar issues. It was considered the top of the heap, praised for its sophisticated technology, and then suddenly faced an existential threat. A young company created a new way of finding content.
Instead of trying to make its core product better, fixing the issues its users had, the company, instead, became more of a portal, weighted down by bloated services that worked less and less well. The company’s CEO admitted in 2002 that it “tried to become a portal too late in the game, and lost focus” and told Wired at the time that it was going to try and double back and focus on search again. But it never regained the lead.
That company was AltaVista. Source: How Google made the world go viral | The Verge
A new peer-reviewed study suggests that YouTube’s efforts to stop people being radicalized through its recommendation algorithm have been effective. The study monitored 1,181 people’s YouTube activity and found that only 6% watched extremist videos, with most of these deliberately subscribing to extremist channels.
Interestingly, though, the study cannot account for user behaviour prior to YouTube’s 2019 algorithm changes, which means we can only wonder about how influential the platform was in terms of radicalization up to and including pretty significant elections.
The process of “falling down the rabbit hole” was memorably illustrated by personal accounts of people who had ended up on strange paths into the dark heart of the platform, where they were intrigued and then convinced by extremist rhetoric—an interest in critiques of feminism could lead to men’s rights and then white supremacy and then calls for violence. Most troubling is that a person who was not necessarily looking for extreme content could end up watching it because the algorithm noticed a whisper of something in their previous choices. It could exacerbate a person’s worst impulses and take them to a place they wouldn’t have chosen, but would have trouble getting out of.
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The… research is… important, in part because it proposes a specific, technical definition of ‘rabbit hole’. The term has been used in different ways in common speech and even in academic research. Nyhan’s team defined a “rabbit hole event” as one in which a person follows a recommendation to get to a more extreme type of video than they were previously watching. They can’t have been subscribing to the channel they end up on, or to similarly extreme channels, before the recommendation pushed them. This mechanism wasn’t common in their findings at all. They saw it act on only 1 percent of participants, accounting for only 0.002 percent of all views of extremist-channel videos.
Nyhan was careful not to say that this paper represents a total exoneration of YouTube. The platform hasn’t stopped letting its subscription feature drive traffic to extremists. It also continues to allow users to publish extremist videos. And learning that only a tiny percentage of users stumble across extremist content isn’t the same as learning that no one does; a tiny percentage of a gargantuan user base still represents a large number of people. Source: The World Will Never Know the Truth About YouTube’s Rabbit Holes | The Atlantic
Ben McKenzie, an actor turned anti-crypto activist, argues in his new book Easy Money that while cryptocurrencies highlight legitimate flaws in the financial system, they are essentially a Ponzi scheme.
He criticises the “Hollywoodisation” of crypto and the lack of regulatory oversight, warning that the tech utopianism surrounding crypto and now AI could leave many losers in its wake. It’s funny how people seamlessly move from one grift to the next without ever being properly called out on it.
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After a friend urged him to buy Bitcoin, McKenzie – a former economics student with a degree from the University of Virginia – took a 24-part online course on cryptocurrencies, taught by the current US Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler. He came away thinking the entire cryptocurrency thing was a scam. Worse, it was a scam with a lot of momentum behind it. “Advocates will tell you there is no ‘Bitcoin marketing department’,” McKenzie said. “But of course, if Bitcoin and crypto doesn’t have a product, if there is no actual tangible asset behind it, then in fact, Bitcoin and crypto is only marketing. It’s only a story.”
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During the peak of 2021, some of the most recognisable people in the world – including Matt Damon, Reese Witherspoon and Kim Kardashian – began promoting cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
McKenzie told me this is part of a more aggressive “hustle culture” in which people use their social contacts to promote products. Multi-level marketing (or MLM) and pyramid-selling schemes have existed for at least a century, but they have been transformed by technology. “In the 1950s, if you wanted to sell someone Mary Kay Cosmetics or Tupperware, you would need to invite them over to your house, cook them dinner, spend three hours trying to convince them [to buy products].” Now, he said, “the MLM can be done through TikTok and Instagram.”
Though McKenzie is openly critical of the celebrities who have pushed these products, he reserves ultimate blame for the sluggish regulators that allowed it to happen. “I think in many cases the celebrities didn’t really understand what they were selling. Which is not to absolve them of a moral, ethical [or] potentially even legal responsibility for their actions. But they don’t need to be bad people – they just see easy money, right?” Source: “The biggest Ponzi of all time”: why Ben McKenzie became a crypto critic | New Statesman
There’s a lot going on in this short post. It reminded me of a saying of Steve Jobs: “A players attract A players. B players attract C players.”
Now there’s something in that, in terms of the mentality that people bring to working hard and playing hard. But this post is talking about the way that people treat other people.
I’ve definitely noticed in my life, from my own studies to my kids sports teams, the tyranny of the “not quite top-level” mindset. It’s almost like you have to get over yourself to get to the “top”. What that is and whether it’s worth pursuing is another question entirely.
When I stopped doing tris and moved back to field sports, I started to notice the same thing. The very top athletes were nice to everyone and so were the middle and bottom of the pack. The not quite top players, though, were less friendly. They played more political games, and acted out their threatened feelings of being not quite good enough by being snobbish to those below them. (In retrospect, I worry I did some of this, too, especially when I was playing on a top team but was not a top player. I definitely felt a need to prove myself.)
I have since noted the same phenomenon in nearly every domain, including academia. The truly great researchers are generous and friendly; so are many of the middle of the roaders. Those who have something to prove, though, and who feel like they aren’t quite managing to do it, show definite aspects of being B lane swimmers. Source: The B Lane Swimmer | Holly Witteman
Image: Quino AI
The Burning Man Festival started in 1986 as a small event on a beach. It was originally an event for hippies, bohemians, and those who lived outside of mainstream culture. It’s an art event.
As with most things like this, it became cool, and so people with money started going. Now, less than 40 years later, it’s dominated by the Silicon Valley elite, celebrities, and grifters.
While one person has died this year due to extreme weather events, which is a tragedy, I can’t help but feel some schadenfreude at rich people being stuck in a situation they can’t buy their way out of.
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As of noon Saturday, Nevada’s Bureau of Land Management declared the entrance to Burning Man shut down for good. “Rain over the last 24 hours has created a situation that required a full stop of vehicle movement on the playa. More rain is expected over the next few days and conditions are not expected to improve enough to allow vehicles to enter the playa,” read a BLM statement.
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The festival this year was already taking place under unusual circumstances with the desert floor flooded by the remnants of Hurricane Hilary as the event was being set up.
Tara Saylor, an attendee from Ojai, California, faced the threat of the hurricane as well as a 5.1-magnitude earthquake that shook her city before she left, reported the Los Angeles Times. Saylor told the newspaper she’s seen the founders of two different companies at Burning Man this year, but added, “it doesn’t matter how much money you have, nobody can do anything about it. There’s no planes, there’s no buses.”
“Money does not solve disasters like this.” Source: Burning Man festival-goers trapped in desert as rain turns site to mud | The Guardian
A couple of years ago, I started subscribing to Northern Earth magazine on the recommendation of Warren Ellis. It’s quirky and brilliant.
The most recent issue contains reference to Rungholt, which I then looked up on Wikipedia. It was destroyed in the 14th century due to a storm surge. Until excavations this year people weren’t entirely sure it ever existed but it turns out it was a flourishing port town.
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In June 2023, the German Research Foundation announced that researchers had found the probable location of Rungholt under mudflats in the Wadden Sea and had already mapped 10 square kilometers of the area.
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Today it is widely accepted that Rungholt existed and was not just a local legend. Documents support this, although they mostly date from much later times (16th century). Archaeologists think Rungholt was an important town and port. It might have contained up to 500 houses, with about 3,000 people. Findings indicate trade in agricultural products and possibly amber. Supposed relics of the town have been found in the Wadden Sea, but shifting sediments make it hard to preserve them. Source: Rungholt | Wikipedia
This is an absolutely incredible piece of work, showing the complexity and sophistication of the Aztec empire. My favourite part is the slider that allows you to see how much of Mexico City is based upon the structure of Tenochtitlan.
Today, we call this city Ciudad de Mexico - Mexico City.
Not much is left of the old Aztec - or Mexica - capital Tenochtitlan. What did this city, raised from the lake bed by hand, look like? Using historical and archeological sources, and the expertise of many, I have tried to faithfully bring this iconic city to life. Source: A Portrait of Tenochtitlan
As a parent of a 16 year-old boy and 12 year-old girl I found this article fascinating. Written by Caleb Silverberg, now 17 years of age, it describes his decision to break free from his screen addiction and enrol in Midland, an experiential boarding school located in a forest where technology is forbidden.
Trading his smartphone for an ax, he found liberation and genuine human connection through chores like chopping firewood, living off the land, and engaging in face-to-face conversations. Silverberg advocates for a “Technology Shabbat,” a periodic break from screens, as a solution for his generation’s screen-related issues like ADHD and depression.
I vaguely remembered one of my older sister’s friends describing her unique high school, Midland, an experiential boarding school located in the Los Padres National Forest. The school was founded in 1932 under the belief of “Needs Not Wants.” In the forest, cell phones and video games are forbidden, and replaced with a job to keep the place running: washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms, or sanitizing the mess hall. Students depend on one another.
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September 2, 2021, was my first day at Midland, when I traded my smartphone for an ax.
At Midland, students must chop firewood to generate hot water for their showers and heat for their cabins and classrooms. If no one chops the wood or makes the fire, there’s a cold shower, a freezing bed, or a chilly classroom. No punishment by a teacher or adult. Just the disappointment of your peers. Your friends.
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Before Midland, whenever I sat on the couch, engrossed in TikTok or Instagram, my parents would caution me: “Caleb, your brain is going to melt if you keep staring at that screen!” I dismissed their concerns at first. But eventually, I experienced life without an electronic device glued to my hand and learned they were right all along.
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I have been privileged to attend Midland. But anyone can benefit from its lessons. To my generation, I would like to offer a 5,000-year-old solution to our twenty-first-century dilemma. Shabbat is the weekly sabbath in Judaic custom where individuals take 24 hours to rest and relax. This weekly reset allows our bodies and minds to recharge. Source: Why I Traded My Smartphone for an Ax | The Free Press
This article by Andrew Dessler discusses the near-miss catastrophe of ozone depletion. Anyone alive at the time can probably remember how the world came together to address the issue by phasing out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) through the Montreal Protocol in 1987.
Dessler draws parallels with the current climate crisis, arguing that global policy collaboration based on scientific research can solve pressing environmental issues. Along the way, he also debunks claims that transitioning to renewable energy would be economically catastrophic.
Even before evidence of actual ozone depletion was observed, countries began to take action. For example, the U.S. banned many non-essential uses of the chemicals, such as propellants in aerosol spray cans. This reflected a different view at the time that government should protect its citizens rather than protect the profits of corporations.
By the mid-1980s, the world was busy negotiating the phase-out of the primary ozone-depleting CFCs when the Antarctic ozone hole (AOH) was discovered. The AOH is an annual event: over Antarctica, the majority of the ozone is destroyed during Spring. The ozone builds back up as Spring ends and, by Summer, things are basically back to normal.
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The ‘reference’ future is our world, the ‘world avoided’ is the world that would have existed had we not phased out CFCs. By the 2060s, the world would have lost two-thirds of it’s ozone. This, in turn, would have greatly increased the dangerous ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface. This plot shows the UV dose at noon under clear skies in July in mid-latitudes.
Today’s value of 10 is ‘high risk’ for UV exposure, which is why public health professionals tell you to wear sunscreen when you go out. The world avoided has a UV index of 30 — three times what is considered high risk and high enough to give you a perceptible sunburn in 5 minutes. Source: Ozone depletion: The bullet that missed |Andrew Dessler
Many readers will be aware of the extreme weather conditions in Vermont USA. This has led to a disastrous year for agriculture and financial struggles for local farmers.
The article delves into the broader implications of these challenges, framing them within the context of ‘disaster capitalism,’ where the degradation of farming and natural resources is exploited for profit, exacerbating systemic issues and inequalities. We’re at the thin of the wedge with this stuff.
These numbers show that we are in the age of the disaster capitalism described by Naomi Klein after she witnessed the response to Katrina. There has always been more income in the breaking of human lives than in maintaining them. In truth, the 20th century surge in disposable products and planned obsolescence was nothing but extracting profits from breakdown. Similarly, our economy was strongest as it pulled itself out of the devastation of World War II. As long as there are resources and cheap labor somewhere, somebody will profit over our loss. What is different now is that nearly resources and cheap labor are being funneled into this economics of disaster with little left to sustain actual lives.
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We are in disaster capitalism and have been for a long while. I believe that capitalism has always been intrinsically tied to disaster and destruction, whether natural or engineered, but not many people share my views — because my views are from the edge spaces, the bottom and sides of this system. I sit outside and can see things that those dependent on this capitalist system for privilege and wealth do not, or can not. Upton Sinclair’s quip about the inverse relationship between a man’s paycheck and his ability to comprehend any given issue is the duct tape that holds capitalism together in these increasingly disastrous times — increasingly disastrous because of capitalism, whether the result of inadvertent externality or planned waste and breakdown. This system can only survive if enough people refuse to see that its basic function is destruction. Though of course it can also only survive if there are cheap resources and labor to mine for disaster remediation, and we are now entering the stage of late capitalism that has no more cheap things to turn into waste. Capital is feeding on itself, struggling to bring in revenues that can cover its increased costs — costs like fires and floods, scarce resources and a debilitated workforce wracked by disaster. The system needs all the propaganda it can muster to keep telling itself that it is alive and well, keeping those men with dependent paychecks blind to its demise. Source: The future earth is already here | resilience
The article in Insider discusses the findings of the 2022 World Inequality Report, which highlights extreme levels of wealth and income inequality globally. The report was coordinated by leading economists and debunks the trickle-down economic theory.
They found that the bottom half of the global population owns just 2% of total wealth, while the top 10% holds 76%. It also notes that billionaires now hold a 3% share of global wealth, up from 1% in 1995. As everyone knows, inequality is a result of political choices and the only way to fix it is through progressive wealth taxes and perhaps even reparations.
The researchers are some of the leading minds on inequality in the entire field of economics. Chancel is the co-director of the World Inequality Lab, while Saez and Zucman have literally written a book on the rich dodging taxes and helped create wealth tax proposals for senators like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
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Billionaire gains are a well-documented trend: The left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness found that Americans added $2.1 trillion to their wealth during the pandemic, a 70% increase. Source: Huge 20-Year Study Shows Trickle-Down Is a Myth, Inequality Rampant | Insider
Image: Mathieu Stern
I can’t remember whether someone said to me or I once read that we should manage our energy rather than our time, but it made a big difference to my life. Having control over when and how you work is a huge privilege, and enables you to be the best version of you.
People often smile or laugh when I talk about the SOFA philosophy, but giving yourself the freedom to start creative pursuits and not finish them is actually massively liberating, mood-boosting, and energy-giving.
The point being that you don’t need to ‘make time’ to do things. You just need to prioritise stuff that energises you.
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We all know that time can be stretchy or compressed—we’ve experienced hours that plodded along interminably and those that whisked by in a few breaths. We’ve had days in which we got so much done we surprised ourselves and days where we got into a staring contest with the to-do list and the to-do list didn’t blink. And we’ve also had days that left us puddled on the floor and days that left us pumped up, practically leaping out of our chairs. What differentiates these experiences isn’t the number of hours in the day but the energy we get from the work. Energy makes time.
Here’s a concrete example, and perhaps a familiar one: someone is so busy with work and caretaking that they don’t make time for their art. At the end of the day they’re too tired to write or paint or make music or whathaveyou. So they don’t. Days, then weeks go by. They are more and more tired. They are getting less and less done. They take a mental health day and catch up on sleep but the exhaustion persists. Their overwhelm grows larger, becomes intolerable. The usual tactics don’t work..
Then one day they say fuck it all. They eat leftover pasta over the sink, drop mom off at her mahjongg game, and go sit in the park to draw. They draw for hours, until the sun goes down and they’re squinting under the street lights. And, lo and behold, the next day they plow through all those lingering to-dos. They see clearly that half of them were unnecessary when before they all seemed critical. They recognize a few others as things better handed off to their peers. They suddenly find time for attending to that one project they’d been procrastinating on for weeks. They sleep better. Their skin looks great. (Okay I might be exaggerating on that last one, but only mildly.)
It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.
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The question to ask with all those things isn’t, “how do I make time for this?” The answer to that question always disappoints, because that view of time has it forever speeding away from you. The better question is, how does doing what I need make time for everything else? Source: Energy makes time | everything changes
Image: Aron Visuals
Casey Newton delves into the limitations of current note-taking apps like Obsidian, arguing that they are designed more for storing information than for sparking insights or improving thinking. He suggests that while AI has the potential to revolutionise these platforms by making them more interactive and insightful, the real challenge lies in our ability to focus and think deeply — something that software alone cannot automate.
This is partly why I write Thought Shrapnel. Not only does it force me to actually read things I’ve bookmaked, but I make sense of them, and often make links to my work and other things I’ve read.
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In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might not even be worth trying.
The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.
Which is not to say that software can’t help. Andy Matuschak, a researcher whose spectacular website offers a feast of thinking about notes and note-taking, observes that note-taking apps emphasize displaying and manipulating notes, but never making sense between them. Before I totally resign myself to the idea that a note-taking app can’t solve my problems, I will admit that on some fundamental level no one has really tried. Source: Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter | Platformer
Real-world studies such as this are important for busting myths about homeless people spending money recklessly compared to the rest of us.
The biases punctured by the study highlight the difficulties in developing policies to reduce homelessness, say the Canadian researchers behind it. They said the unconditional cash appeared to reduce homelessness, giving added weight to calls for a guaranteed basic income that would help adults cover essential living expenses.
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They found the cash recipients each spent an average of 99 fewer days homeless than the control group, increased their savings more and also “cost” society less by spending less time in shelters.
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Researchers ensured the cash was in a lump sum “to enable maximum purchasing freedom and choice” as opposed to small, consistent transfers. Source: Canada study debunks stereotypes of homeless people’s spending habits | The Guardian
TL;DR seems to be that copyright isn’t going to prevent people data mining content to use for training AI models. However, there are protections around privacy that might come into play.
You can use CC licenses to grant permission for reuse in any situation that requires permission under copyright. However, the licenses do not supersede existing limitations and exceptions; in other words, as a licensor, you cannot use the licenses to prohibit a use if it is otherwise permitted by limitations and exceptions to copyright.
This is directly relevant to AI, given that the use of copyrighted works to train AI may be protected under existing exceptions and limitations to copyright. For instance, we believe there are strong arguments that, in most cases, using copyrighted works to train generative AI models would be fair use in the United States, and such training can be protected by the text and data mining exception in the EU. However, whether these limitations apply may depend on the particular use case.
Source: Understanding CC Licenses and Generative AI | Creative Commons
I think it’s fascinating that this article uses a zeugma to explain what’s happened to places that we’ve called home online. In other words, we’ve moved from social media to social media with the emphasis on the content and performance rather than the sharing.
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Despite the efforts of big incumbents and buzzy new apps, the old ways of posting are gone, and people don’t want to go back. Even Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, admitted that users have moved on to direct messages, closed communities, and group chats. Regularly posting content is now largely confined to content creators and influencers, while non-creators are moving toward sharing bits of their lives behind private accounts.
As more people have been confronted with the consequences of constant sharing, social media has become less social and more media — a constellation of entertainment platforms where users consume content but rarely, if ever, create their own. Influencers, marketers, average users, and even social-media executives agree: Social media, as we once knew it, is dead.
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And if Instagram was the bellwether for the rise and fall of the “social” social-media era, it is also a harbinger of this new era. “If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed,” Mosseri said during the “20VC” interview. Given this changing behavior, Mosseri said the platform has shifted its resources to messaging tools. “Actually, at one point a couple years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging,” he said. Source: Social media is dead | Insider
There’s a book by philosopher Alain de Botton called The Art of Travel. In it, he cites Seneca as bemoaning the fact that when you travel you take yourself, with all of your anxieties, frustrations, and insecurities with you. In other words, you might escape your home, but you don’t escape yourself.
This article critically examines the concept of travel, questioning its oft-claimed benefits of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘personal growth’. It cites various thinkers who have critiqued travel (including one of my favourites, Fernando Pessoa) suggesting that it can actually distance us from genuine human connection and meaningful experiences.
It’s hard not to agree with the conclusion that the allure of travel may lie in its ability to temporarily distract us from the existential dread of mortality. Perhaps we need more Marcus Aurelius in our life, who extolled one the benefits of philosophy as being able to be find calm no matter where you are.
For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.)
Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position. I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.
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The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.
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Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning? Source: The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
This article suggests using the academic calendar as a framework for setting and achieving personal goals, breaking life into “semesters” to focus on mini-goals that contribute to larger ambitions. It argues that this approach can aid in time management, motivation, and skill development, offering a structured yet flexible way to make meaningful progress in various aspects of life.
As someone who spent a long time in formal education, was a teacher, and spent time working in Higher Education, it’s difficult to get out of the habit of the academic year and breaking your work into ‘terms’. Perhaps I should be leaning into it?
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Modeling your life after academic years allows you to adequately mark your process. It’s difficult to determine improvement with daily or even weekly goals, Fishbach says. But with a quarterly or biannual milestone, you’re more easily able to track your progress; you can more clearly look back on what you’ve learned after a 20-week intro to coding class as opposed to after a few days of instruction. The end of a semester allows for these report cards. “It just helps you feel that you’re growing as a person,” Fishbach says. “You’re not the person you were three months ago.”
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A self-imposed semester system also lends itself to increased motivation due, in part, to the fresh start effect, where people are more driven to pursue goals after a “fresh start” like a new year or semester. (Fully embrace the back-to-school energy and buy some new school supplies, Wu says, “and then learn something.”) With goals that have an endpoint, called an all-or-nothing goal, Fishbach says, motivation increases as you approach the deadline. Having a distinct cutoff to your personal semester can help you stay driven knowing there’s an end in sight. Source: Semesters for adults: How the academic school year can help with goal-setting, time management, and motivation | Vox
This interactive tool maps in 3D where our planet will become unihabitable due to a combination of heat, water stress, sea level rise, and tropical cyclones.
It’s an amazing and depressing visualisation, which indirectly shows how climate migration will inevitably increase in the coming decades.
It’s interesting that this is being conceptualised as an ‘artwork’ rather than a technological intervention. Perhaps this is the way to deal with the climate crisis, by bringing algorithms from the cold, sterile environment of technology into the warmer, more joyful world of art?
This multidisciplinary project by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg explores the relationship between humans, nature, and technology and aims to draw attention to the importance of insects in pollination by creating an algorithmic solution for planting designs that serve a diverse range of pollinator species.
The project changes depending on location, debuting at the Eden Project in 2021 and includes 7,000 plants across 80 varieties. These provide food and nesting spots for insects with the aim to create the world’s largest climate-positive artwork.
The other thing that’s really important to me is upending the idea of value. The art market is all about the one, the singular, the limited edition. This is an unlimited edition. The idea is: the more people who have one, the better each one is because each one supports the other. For me, that’s a strong statement to make to commissioners and when I’m trying to get more partners involved. It’s a very different way of thinking about how we create art and what its purpose is. For me, this is about playfulness, joy and celebrating nature. I call it an artwork and not a garden project because I think situating it in that context makes a powerful statement in itself. Source: An Interview with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg | Berlin Art Link
I had the pleasure of working with the large-brained Helen Beetham when I was at Jisc just over a decade ago. In this long-ish post, she covers quite a few areas of, with plenty of links, and pulls the threads together around graduate jobs and an AI curriculum.
While I could have quoted a lot of this, especially around innovation, the stories being told to graduates, and the neo-colonial nature of AI companies, I’ve gone for the last three paragraphs in which Helen discusses bullshit jobs. I’d highly recommend reading the whole thing.
The longer you look at the things ChatGPT can do, the more they resemble what David Graeber described as Bullshit Jobs - jobs that don’t need doing. While I don’t agree with the way he singles out specific job roles, Graeber is surely right that more and more work involves doing things with data and information and ‘content’ that has no value beyond maintaining those systems. And one claim he made that is borne out by workplace research is that meaningless work is bad for people’s mental health.
It’s a nice little aphorism that ‘if AI can do your job, AI should do your job’. But here’s a different one. If AI can ‘do’ your job, you deserve a better job. And if meaningless jobs are bad for workers’ mental health, how much worse are they for all our futures? The phrase ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ hardly begins to cover our present situation. As the polycrisis heats up, the crisis of not enough water-cooler text is not something any graduate should have to care about, nor any university curriculum either. Source: ‘Luckily, we love tedious work’ | Helen Beetham
Thought Shrapnel is a prude-free zone, especially as the porn industry tends to be a technological innovator. It’s important to say, though, that the objectification of women and non-consensual generation of pornography is not just a bad thing but societally corrosive.
By now, we’re familiar with AI models being able to create images of almost anything. I’ve read of wonderful recent advances in the world of architecture, for example. Some of the most popular AI generators have filters to prevent abuse, but of course there are many others.
As this article details, a lot of porn has already been generated. Again, prudishness aside relating to people’s kinks, there are all kind of philosophical, political, legal, and issues at play here. Child pornography is abhorrent; how is our legal system going to deal with AI generated versions? What about the inevitable ‘shaming’ of people via AI generated sex acts?
All of this is a canary in the coalmine for what happens in society at large. And this is why philosophical training is important: it helps you grapple with the implications of technology, the ‘why’ as well as the what. I’ve got a lot more thoughts on this, but I actually think it would be a really good topic to discuss as part of the next season of the WAO podcast.
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Since Mage by default saves every image generated on the site, clicking on a username will reveal their entire image generation history, another wall of images that often includes hundreds or thousands of AI-generated sexual images of various celebrities made by just one of Mage’s many users. A user’s image generation history is presented in reverse chronological order, revealing how their experimentation with the technology evolves over time.
Scrolling through a user’s image generation history feels like an unvarnished peek into their id. In one user’s feed, I saw eight images of the cartoon character from the children’s’ show Ben 10, Gwen Tennyson, in a revealing maid’s uniform. Then, nine images of her making the “ahegao” face in front of an erect penis. Then more than a dozen images of her in bed, in pajamas, with very large breasts. Earlier the same day, that user generated dozens of innocuous images of various female celebrities in the style of red carpet or fashion magazine photos. Scrolling down further, I can see the user fixate on specific celebrities and fictional characters, Disney princesses, anime characters, and actresses, each rotated through a series of images posing them in lingerie, schoolgirl uniforms, and hardcore pornography. Each image represents a fraction of a penny in profit to the person who created the custom Stable Diffusion model that generated it.
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Generating pornographic images of real people is against the Mage Discord community’s rules, which the community strictly enforces because it’s also against Discord’s platform-wide community guidelines. A previous Mage Discord was suspended in March for this reason. While 404 Media has seen multiple instances of non-consensual images of real people and methods for creating them, the Discord community self-polices: users flag such content, and it’s removed quickly. As one Mage user chided another after they shared an AI-generated nude image of Jennifer Lawrence: “posting celeb-related content is forbidden by discord and our discord was shut down a few weeks ago because of celeb content, check [the rules.] you can create it on mage, but not share it here.” Source: Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale | 404 Media
Like most infants, my daughter wanted to speak before she was able to. Unlike most infants, she was extremely frustrated that she couldn’t do so.
Most people can’t draw as well as they would like. Many people become exasperated when they can’t adequately express their ideas in written form.
AI can help with all of this and, in my case, already is. This article, which draws on the results of three academic studies, is interesting in terms of how we can raise the average level of human creativity with the use of AI.
A second paper conducted a wide-ranging crowdsourcing contest, asking people to come up with business ideas based on reusing, recycling, or sharing products as part of the circular economy. The researchers (Léonard Boussioux, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic, and Karim R. Lakhani) then had judges rate those ideas, and compared them to the ones generated by GPT-4. The overall quality level of the AI and human-generated ideas were similar, but the AI was judged to be better on feasibility and impact, while the humans generated more novel ideas.
The final paper did something a bit different, focusing on creative writing ideas, rather than business ideas. The study by Anil R. Doshi and Oliver P. Hauser compared humans working alone to write short stories to humans who used AI to suggest 3-5 possible topics. Again, the AI proved helpful: humans with AI help created stories that were judged as significantly more novel and more interesting than those written by humans alone. There were, however, two interesting caveats. First, the most creative people were helped least by the AI, and AI ideas were generally judged to be more similar to each other than ideas generated by people. Though again, this was using AI purely for generating a small set of ideas, not for writing tasks. Source: Automating creativity | Ethan Mollick
I saw a story that GitHub’s CAPTCHA had become ridiculously hard and multiple people weren’t able to solve it within the time limit. GitHub have presumably upgraded their system because the version we’ve come to know and despise (“click on all of the traffic lights”) is now solved faster by AI than by humans.
“Life is a campaign against malice” said the 17th century Jesuit priest and philosopher Baltasar Gracián. How right he was.
Known as Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA), the technology is intended to protect a website from fraud and abuse without creating friction. The puzzles are meant to ensure that only valid users are able to access the site and not automated invasions.
Google replaced CAPTCHA with a more advanced tool called reCAPTCHA in 2019, but the team’s technical lead Aaron Malenfant told the Verge at the time that the technology would no longer be viable in 10 years’ time because advanced tech would allow the Turing test to run in the background.
His prediction was right. Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots are fast-evolving and are now beating the reCAPTCHA methodology used to confirm the validity and personhood of the users of various websites. They do this by imitating how the human brain and vision work. In fact, AI bots are measuring up to humans, and even beating them, in numerous facets. Source: AI bots are better than humans at solving CAPTCHA puzzles | Quartz
I used to run a site called extinction.fyi which documented the climate emergency. This definitely would have been an article I would have featured on there.
As would the news that French nuclear power stations had to stop running when the water in the rivers next to where they’re situated became too hot. The additional heat of water coming out of the cooling circuits would raise the temperature further, killing aquatic life.
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The ECOSTRESS data, along with follow-up measurements from the ground, showed that tropical canopy temperatures tend to peak at around 34°C, though some regions experienced temperatures that exceeded 40°C. Because there is a surprising amount of temperature variation between the individual leaves on a single tree, the researchers estimated that about a tenth of a percent of all leaves in tropical forests are annually pushed beyond the critical threshold of 46.7°C that marks the breaking point of photosynthesis.
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As global temperatures continue to rise, more tropical leaves will be pushed beyond their photosynthetic capabilities, causing plants to perish. While the researchers emphasized that there is a lot of uncertainty in their models, they warned that an increase in global air temperatures of about 3.9°C could trigger a major photosynthetic meltdown for tropical forests. This estimated increase is within the range of climate models that project a future where human greenhouse gas emissions don’t begin to fall until after 2080. Source: It’s Getting Too Hot for Tropical Trees to Photosynthesize, Scientists Warn | VICE
This fantastic piece by Astra Taylor, whose book The Age of Insecurity is on my to-read list, is sadly behind a paywall. I managed to bypass it, which is why I’m excerpting so much in this post.
What I like is the separation of inequality from insecurity and the difference between existential insecurity from ‘manufactured’ insecurity. Being published in The New York Times, the context is the American economy which largely exists without a social safety net.
The situation is better in the UK/Europe, but we still live in a much more economically precarious world than our parents and grandparents did. And perhaps that’s why everyone’s anxious all of the time.
Such statistics are appalling. They have also become familiar. Since it was catapulted onto the national stage more than a decade ago by Occupy Wall Street, “inequality” has been a frequent topic of conversation in American political life. It helped animate Bernie Sanders’s influential campaigns, reshaped academic scholarship, shifted public policy, and continues to galvanize protest. And yet, however important focusing on the inequality crisis has been, it has also proven insufficient.
If we want to understand contemporary economic life, we need a more expansive framework. We need to think about insecurity. Where inequality encourages us to look up and down, to note extremes of indigence and opulence, insecurity encourages us to look sideways and recognize potentially powerful commonalities.
If inequality can be captured in statistics, insecurity requires talking about feelings: It is, to borrow a phrase from feminism, personal as well as political. Economic issues, I’ve come to realize, are also emotional ones: the spike of shame when a bill collector calls, the adrenaline when the rent or mortgage is due, the foreboding when you think about retirement.
And unlike inequality, insecurity is more than a binary of haves and have-nots. Its universality reveals the degree to which unnecessary suffering is widespread — even among those who appear to be doing well. We are all, to varying degrees, overwhelmed and apprehensive, fearful of what the future might have in store. We are on guard, anxious, incomplete and exposed to risk. To cope, we scramble and strive, shoring ourselves up against potential threats. We work hard, shop hard, hustle, get credentialed, scrimp and save, invest, diet, self-medicate, meditate, exercise, exfoliate.
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Rather than something to pathologize, I want us to see insecurity as an opportunity. We all need protection from life’s hazards, natural or human-made. The simple acceptance of our mutual vulnerability — of the fact that we all need and deserve care throughout our lives — has potentially transformative implications. When we spur people on with insecurity because we expect the worst from them, we create a vicious cycle that stokes desperation and division while facilitating the kind of cutthroat competition and consumption that has brought our fragile planet to a catastrophic brink. When we extend trust and support to others, we improve everyone’s security — including our own.
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Insecurity, after all, is what makes us human, and it is also what allows us to connect and change. “Nothing in Nature ‘becomes itself’ without being vulnerable,” writes the physician Gabor Maté in “The Myth of Normal.” “The mightiest tree’s growth requires soft and supple shoots, just as the hardest-shelled crustacean must first molt and become soft.” There is no growth, he observes, without emotional vulnerability.
The same also applies to societies. Recognizing our shared existential insecurity, and understanding how it is currently used against us, can be a first step toward forging solidarity. Solidarity, in the end, is one of the most important forms of security we can possess — the security of confronting our shared predicament as humans on this planet in crisis, together. Source: Why Does Everyone Feel So Insecure All the Time? | The New York Times
I remember going to a conference session about a decade ago when people were still on the fence about emoji and the presenter said that they were the most important form of visual communication since hieroglyphics.
It’s hard to argue otherwise. I’ve been a huge fan since I noticed that adding a smiley to my emails made a huge difference to the way that people received and understood them. It’s a way of communication at a distance; how would we navigate group chats and social networks without them? 😅
In a book called The Emoji Code, British cognitive linguist Vyvyan Evans describes emojis as “incontrovertibly the world’s first truly universal communication.” That might seem like a tall claim for an ever-expanding set of symbols whose meanings can be fickle. But language evolves, and these ideograms have become the lingua franca of digital communication.
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Perhaps the first study of how these visual representations activate the brain was presented at a conference in 2006.1 Computer scientist Masahide Yuasa, then at Tokyo Denki University in Japan, and his colleagues wanted to see whether our noggins interpret abstract symbolic representations of faces—emoticons made of punctuation marks—in the same way as photographic images of them. They popped several college students into a brain scanning machine (they used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI) and showed them realistic images of happy and sad faces, as well as scrambled versions of these pictures. They also showed them happy and sad emoticons, along with short random collections of punctuation.
The photos lit up a brain region associated with faces. The emoticons didn’t. But they did activate a different area thought to be involved in deciding whether something is emotionally negative or positive. The group’s later work, published in 2011, extended this finding, reporting that emoticons at the end of a sentence made verbal and nonverbal areas of the brain respond more enthusiastically to written text.2 “Just as prosody enriches vocal expressions,” the researchers wrote in their earlier paper, the emoticons seemed to be layering on more meaning and impact. The effect is like a shot of meaning-making caffeine—pure emotional charge. Source: Your 🧠 On Emoji | Nautilus
It looks like electric stimulation of the vagus nerve using something like a TENS machine could help with everything from obesity and depression to Long Covid.
One of the universities local to me is leading some of this work, and they have a page about it here.
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Meanwhile, scientific interest in vagus nerve stimulation is exploding, with studies investigating it as a potential treatment for everything from obesity to depression, arthritis and Covid-related fatigue. So, what exactly is the vagus nerve, and is all this hype warranted?
The vagus nerve is, in fact, a pair of nerves that serve as a two-way communication channel between the brain and the heart, lungs and abdominal organs, plus structures such as the oesophagus and voice box, helping to control involuntary processes, including breathing, heart rate, digestion and immune responses. They are also an important part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs the “rest and digest” processes, and relaxes the body after periods of stress or danger that activate our sympathetic “fight or flight” responses.
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Search “vagus nerve hacks” on TikTok, and you’ll be bombarded with tips ranging from humming in a low voice to twisting your neck and rolling your eyes, to practising yoga or meditation exercises.
Researchers who study the vagus nerve are broadly sceptical of such claims. Though such techniques may help you to feel calmer and happier by activating the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve is only one component of that. “If your heart rate slows, then your vagus nerve is being stimulated,” says Tracey. “However, the nerve fibres that slow your heart rate may not be the same fibres that control your inflammation. It may also depend on whether your vagus nerves are healthy.”
Similarly, immersing your face in cold water may also slow down your heart rate by triggering something called the mammalian dive reflex, which also triggers breath-holding and diverts blood from the limbs to the core. This may serve to protect us from drowning by conserving oxygen, but it involves sympathetic and parasympathetic responses.
Electrical stimulation may hold greater promise though. One thing that makes the vagus nerves so attractive is surgical accessibility in the neck. “It is quite easy to implant some device that will try to stimulate them,” says Dr Benjamin Metcalfe at the University of Bath, who is studying how the body responds to electrical vagus nerve stimulation. “The other reason they’re attractive is because they connect to so many different organ systems. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that vagus nerve stimulation will treat a wide range of diseases and disorders – everything from rheumatoid arthritis through to depression and alcoholism.” Source: The key to depression, obesity, alcoholism – and more? Why the vagus nerve is so exciting to scientists | The Guardian
This article reviews a book entitled A Web of Our Own Making by Antón Barba-Kay which reminded me a lot of an issue of Audrey Watters' Second Breakfast newsletter about the templated body.
What does it mean for there to be multiple, constructed realities. When everyone has a smartwatch and is tracking everything, does that make their life both qualitatively and quantitatively different?
But the fusillade intensity with which Barba-Kay produces these inconvenient truths renders them impossible to ignore; from the details we start to perceive, little by little, the devil. As Barba-Kay writes, “digital technology is training us not simply to a new sense of what is real and really good, but to a new understanding of the contrasts within which we see that reality.” In other words, our awareness of what the virtual world cannot do has made us hungrier for those elements of reality from which we have not yet become alienated.
If reality is changing, it is because, for better and for worse, our lives are increasingly determined by one specific vision of human ingenuity: a vision that valorizes those elements of human life we freely choose (or think we do) over those we once saw as given to us — our bodies, our families, our communities. Digital culture functions today as the Enlightenment cosmopolis once did: as a fantasy in which society reshapes itself along the lines of affinity.
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“Where once it was occasionally possible to opt out of ‘reality’ (by taking drugs, say),” Barba-Kay writes in the book’s perhaps most chilling line, “it is now increasingly necessary to think about how to opt in to it.” And we need to. It may be the most important decision we make in our lives. Source: How the Internet obeys you | The New Atlantis
This blog post which reflects on Cindy Li’s pithy quotation that “we’re all just temporarily abled”. I’m recovering from a rib injury sustained on holiday, so I feel the author’s pain. Hopefully it won’t take me months to recover, but it’s impacting my exercise regime and mental outlook.
It reminded me of a post on the Microsoft Design blog called Kill Your Personas which dives into temporarily disabilities. Definitely worth a read.
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That was almost three months ago now. I’m still limping. It’s getting better but it’s slow. The doctor told me, “Just be aware: this isn’t days or weeks recovery. This is months.”
Since then, I’ve tried to make the best of summer while kids are out of school but my mobility has been limited.
Through all of it, I’ve found myself noticing “accessibility” helpers more than ever before: that railing on the stairs, that ramp off to the side of the building, that elevator tucked away in the back.
All things I rarely noticed before but have since become vital.
And that phrase plays on repeat in my head — “we’re all just temporarily abled”.
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I suppose it’s easy to misunderstand ability as a binary thing. But now I’m understanding more how fluid it is, as it inevitably comes in and out of each of our lives — “100% of people” in their lifetimes.
In classic human fashion, it’s one of those things you take for granted until it’s gone. Source: “We’re All Just Temporarily Abled” | Jim Nielsen’s Blog
An enjoyable take by The Register on the UK’s Online Safety Bill. I was particularly interested by the link to Veilid, a new secure peer-to-peer network for apps which is like the offspring of IPFS and Tor.
Many others have made the point about how much government ministers like the end-to-end encryption of their own WhatsApp communications. But they’d also like to break into, well… everyone else’s.
This same state is, of course, the one demanding that to “protect children,” it should get access to whatever encrypted citizen communication it likes via the Online Safety Bill, which is now rumored to be going through British Parliament in October. This is akin to giving an alcoholic uncle the keys to every booze shop in town to “protect children”: you will find Uncle in a drunken coma with the doors wide open and the stock disappearing by the vanload.
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It is just stupidity stacked on incompetence balanced on political Dunning Krugerism, and the advent of Veilid drowns the lot in a tidal wave of foetid futility. What can a government do about a framework? What can it do about open source?
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The only way to outlaw encryption is to outlaw encryption. Anything less will fail, as it is always possible in software to create kits of parts, all legal by themselves, that can be linked together to provide encryption with no single entity to legislate against. Our industry is fully aware of this. Criminals know it too. Ordinary people will learn it as well, if they have to. This information is free to everyone – except the politicians, it seems. For them, reality is far too expensive. Source: Last rites for UK’s ridiculous Online Safety Bill | The Register
This post by Abigail Goben popped up in several places and is one of those that gives a name to someone most people will recognise. It’s an important differentiation on what is often called ‘care work’ as it highlights how something important is taken when repetitive, administrative work is outsourced to other humans.
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In the workplace, an example of EFT often plays out in the inequality of service labor, and I will specifically use academic service work here as it is my current workplace. Think of the people who end up with more than their share of administrative maintenance tasks — such as organizing get well cards, scheduling workshops, or taking notes. Consider the colleague who has a list of committee appointments a yard long and has just gotten a request to be on Another! Important! (is it?) Committee. These individuals may not be doing these tasks strictly because it is their job responsibility, but because they see a need to be filled or have been asked or tasked with taking on more service that they feel they cannot turn down. And notice how those tasks so often fall to the same group of people — especially when we get to any form of implementation or ongoing commitment rather than the “fun” ideation phase. One way to calculate these service loads would be to count the number of committees and task forces held by and expected of various individuals — who gets a pass and who gets penalized if they don’t say yes.
Quite often there’s a gendered component as to who is tasked with these additional service responsibilities — the office housekeeping as well as the care tasks of the workplace.
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I will admit to never having been able to read Cal Newport’s Deep Work all the way through — I got too irritated — but I would point to his dismissive naming of the idea of “shallow work”, which he defines as logistical and often repetitive tasks, such as writing short emails. Newport recommends entirely stopping or poorly performing that work; I read this as encouraging readers to commit EFT against others around them. Too often the dump off of what are critical responsibilities is not to a specifically tasked and appreciated administrator but instead onto the junior, female, minoritized, non-tenure track, or precarious employees. It’s the maintenance work of keeping the workplace going and we do not appreciate the maintainers. Similarly thinking about EFT in the workplace, I was reminded of the guy who got famous with the Four Hour Workweek book and how we were all just supposed to outsource things to nameless underpaid gig workers. Notably, when looking for a summary of that book, I found an article by Cal Newport praising it. Source: Executive Function Theft | Hedgehog Librarian
Image: Uday Mittal
This explains a lot. Basically, studies have found that a specific part of the brain behaves differently in anxious individuals, and this difference might explain why they struggle with emotional control. It’s like a traffic jam in the brain that makes it harder for the signals to get through, leading to difficulties in managing emotional reactions.
I’m sharing this article to make a comment about the framing for these kinds of things. The article is an extract from a book by David Runciman, and implicitly links human worth to jobs.
Part of the existential dread of AI replacing humans is that, if your job is your life, then who are you without the doing? Instead of hand-wringing about robots and machines, perhaps our time is better spent figuring out who we are and how we want to flourish.
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Efficiency – even accuracy – turns out not to be the main requirement of the organisations that employ people to give decisions during sports games. They are also highly sensitive to appearance, which includes a wish to keep their sport looking and feeling like it’s still a human-centred enterprise. Smart technology can do many things, but in the absence of convincingly humanoid robots, it can’t really do that. So actual people are required to stand between the machines and those on the receiving end of their judgments. The result is more work all round.
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How things look isn’t everything. There are significant parts of every organisation where appearance doesn’t matter so much, in the backrooms and maybe even the boardrooms that the public never gets to see. Behind-the-scenes technical knowledge that underpins the performance of public-facing tasks is likely to be an increasingly precarious basis for reliable employment. This is true of many professions, including accountancy, consultancy and the law. There will still be lots of work for the people who deal with people. But the business of gathering data, processing information and searching for precedents can now more reliably be done by machines. The people who used to undertake this work, especially those in entry-level jobs such as clerks, administrative assistants and paralegals, might not be OK.
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History offers a partial guide to what might happen. Worries about automation displacing human workers are as old as the idea of the job itself. The Industrial Revolution disrupted many kinds of labour – especially on the land – and undid entire ways of life. The transition was grim for those who had to switch from one mode of subsistence existence to another. Yet the end result was many more jobs, not fewer. Factories brought in machines to do faster and more reliably what humans used to do or could never do at all; at the same time, factories were where the new jobs appeared, involving the performance of tasks that were never required before the coming of the machines. This pattern has repeated itself time and again: new technology displaces familiar forms of work, causing massively painful disruption. It is little consolation to the people who lose their jobs to be told that soon enough there will be entirely new ways of earning a living. But there will. Source: The end of work: which jobs will survive the AI revolution? | The Guardian
I’m 42 but look much younger than my father did at his age. And I’m sure that he looked younger than my grandfather did at his age. This is an interesting article about why.
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While factors like diet, skincare and aesthetic procedures can make us physically look younger – hairstyles, make-up and fashion also play a role in how youthful we appear. While someone with 2023-esque micro bangs may scream young to us, we associate photos of 80s hairstyles and big shoulder pads with being older, even if the person in the image is the same age as us. This is partly because of how we consider trendy hairstyles and fashion of that time to be outdated.
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Today we might be obsessed with preserving our youth, but this wasn’t always the case. In past decades, popular trends often existed to make young people appear more sophisticated and bold. “The dramatic nature of [80s] hairstyles often conveyed a sense of confidence and authority, which could be associated with older individuals,” hairdresser Gwenda Harmon says. “Certain hairstyles of the 1980s actually made some youth appear older due to their bold and sophisticated nature.” Source: Why did people in the past look so much older? | Dazed
I’ve seen this culture clash outlined before, although I wouldn’t necessarily use the labels ‘ask’ and ‘guess for the different approaches. I was raised by a mother who very much (still!) relies on inference to live her life. I’ve found being much more direct useful in living my own.
(I’d also note that the author seems to be playing fast-and-loose with the term ‘Western’ to mean ‘American’ here as British people are much more likely to be guessers than askers in my experience.)
Ask culture expectations
If you’re more a guess-culture person, asking people for help without knowing their circumstances can feel rude or intrusive. Broadcasting publicly your need for help can feel awkward and vulnerable.
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Western society is very much ask culture. A classic example can be found in proverbs. “A squeaky wheel gets the grease” is an American proverb, enforcing the ideas of individualism and that asking for what you want will benefit you. Source: Ask vs guess culture | Tech and Tea
Futurist Stowe Boyd imagines life in 2050, through three scenarios. I can’t help but think that ‘Collapseland’ (excerpted below) is the most likely outcome. Sadly.
When I was younger I slogged through some terrible books that, because they were deemed ‘classics’, I thought I should read. Thankfully, I’m a lot more ruthless with non-fiction and, in fact, these days I’m happy to give up on a book I’m not finding enjoyable/relevant after 50 pages.
The interesting thing, though, is that it’s always worth coming back to books. Sometimes, a change in interest, age, or context can completely change your relationship with them.
Now, I believe it’s much more useful to say something in this form: this book has this value to this person in this context.
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The idea that a book’s value is best judged alongside the notional reader and their current context has some corollaries:
First, reading the books that your heroes cite as important will not necessarily be rewarding. If you admire Bret Victor for his work on computing interfaces, only some of his library will be high value to you because his library also includes lots of books that have nothing to do with UI.
Second, yes, it’s likely that “great books” may be high value in some more universal sense that is independent of reader and context. And, yes, this high value may come from something inherent in the quality of the books, rather than from the fact that they are about themes that are more relevant to more people. Yes, I probably wouldn’t dispute this. But I suspect that relevance to person and context is a better guide to what to read.
Third, book recommendation systems based on your reading history can be helpful, but only so much. You, now, are not represented by your reading history. You’ve changed. Making recommendations based on books you read twenty years ago might produce good books for you, now. But probably not. Source: Is this a good book for me, now? | Mary Rose Cook
Image: Thought Catalog
I’m very much optimistic about the uses of AI tools such as LLMs to help with specific tasks. See the latest post on my personal blog, for example.
However, what I’m concerned about is AI decision-making. In this case, a crazy law is being implemented by people who haven’t read the books in questions who outsource the decision to a language model that doesn’t really understand what’s being asked of it.
“Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books,” Exman tells PopSci via email. “At the same time, we do have a legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law. Our goal here really is a defensible process.”
According to The Gazette, the resulting strategy involved compiling a master list of commonly challenged books, then utilizing a previously unnamed “AI software” to supposedly provide textual analysis for each title. Flagged books were then removed from Mason City’s 7-12th grade school library collections and “stored in the Administrative Center” as educators “await further guidance or clarity.” Titles included Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights. Source: School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books | Popular Science
I’ve had reason to reflect on how easy my life is recently. Not only am I a straight, middle-aged, able-bodied white guy but, according to Gapminder, I’m living life in a prosperous country on ‘Level 4’.
Worth pondering.
People at this Income Level are able to buy consumer goods, fly abroad with their families on holiday, and eat out at restaurants. None of these luxuries are available to people living at Levels 1 – 3, but are considered normal by most at Level 4.
The food they eat is often highly nutritious and diverse, as well as being rich in protein and vitamins. People at Level 4 can even buy pre-prepared food to save them time on cooking.
At this Income Level, not only electricity but also Internet connections are extremely reliable. Nearly every home has at least one TV and computer, and kitchens are equipped with stoves, ovens, toasters, and microwaves. Homes also have baths and showers installed with both hot and cold water — another luxury that is extremely rare at any other Income Level.
Instead of bikes and mopeds, people living at Level 4 usually own a car — sometimes even two per family. Public transport is also organized and readily available to everybody.
Perhaps most importantly, life at Level 4 is more secure than it is for people at levels 1 – 3. Not only are doors and windows locked securely, valuable property is usually insured against damage or theft. People also have bank accounts, access to credit, and pension funds for when they retire. Healthcare is also readily available to people living at Level 4, with basic medication available at affordable rates from local shops, and advanced and emergency medical treatment available locally to almost everybody. Source: Income Level 4 | Gapminder
A few weeks ago, I watched part of the EA Sports FC 24 announcement video with my son. The CEO of Electronic Arts mentioned something that anyone who’s been paying attention already knows: games like FIFA (of which EA Sports FC is the spiritual successor) has transformed football.
There’s a symbiotic link between how people play football and how people play football video games. What’s less easy to spot is how talent is identified, nurtured, and shaped. That’s where articles like this one about AI in the behind-the-scenes processes comes in.
As someone with two very sporty kids, and one of whom is potentially on a pathway to professional football, this is fascinating to me.
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Luis Cortell, senior recruiting coach for men’s soccer for NCSA College Recruiting, is a little less bullish, but still believes AI can be an asset. “Right now, soccer involves more of a feel for the player, and an understanding of the game, and there aren’t any success metrics for college performance," he said. “While AI won’t fully fill that gap, there is an opportunity to help provide additional context.”
At the same time, people in the industry should be wary of idealizing AI as a godsend. “People expect AI to be amazing, to not make errors or if it makes errors, it makes errors rarely,” Shapiro said. The fact is, predictive models will always make mistakes but both researchers and investors alike want to make sure that AI innovations in the space can make “fewer errors and less expensive errors” than the ones made by human beings.
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The MLS said in a statement that ai.io’s technology “eliminates barriers like cost, geography and time commitment that traditionally limit the accessibility of talent discovery programs.” Felton-Thomas said it is more important to understand that ai.io will “democratize” the recruiting process for the MLS, ensuring physical skills are the most important metric when leagues and clubs are deciding where to invest their money. “What we’re looking to do is give the clubs a higher confidence level when they’re making these decisions on who to sign and who to watch.” By implementing the AI-powered app, recruitment timelines are also expected to be cut. Source: Will AI revolutionize professional soccer recruitment? | Engadget
I can’t wait to play this. While I enjoy playing Doom Eternal by myself occasionally, LAN gaming the Quake II takes me back to being a teenager!
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
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You get a lot of content for 10 bucks; the package includes the game’s original campaign, both previously released expansions, Quake II 64, and a new campaign called Call of the Machine with 28 levels developed by Machine Games (the team behind the recent Wolfenstein games).
There’s also split-screen local multiplayer (up to four players), as well as LAN and online multiplayer. Source: Quake II gets a remaster for PC and consoles—and it’s exactly what it needs to be | Ars Technica
Science is awesome. I love the way that we continue to rediscover and reinterpret what it means to be human based on archaeology and scientific theories.
Adding to the mystery is the fact that the now long-extinct species behaved in several key ways like modern humans - and yet appears to have been able to do that with brains which were only a third the size of ours.
The evidence assembled so far is beginning to suggest that these small-brained ‘ape-men’ may have been able to do seven remarkable things:
“We know that what we’re discovering breaks totally new ground - and is therefore likely to be controversial. That’s why we are deploying every possible type of investigative technology to ensure that the maximum amount of additional evidence can be found,” said the leader of the Rising Star Cave investigation, National Geographic and University of Witwatersrand palaeoanthropologist, Professor Lee Berger, who with co-investigator, human evolution expert Professor John Hawks, has just published a detailed National Geographic book on the discoveries, entitled Cave of Bones. Source: Scientific discovery casts doubt on our understanding of human evolution | The Independent
I’ve only been there once, but Montana is an absolutely beautiful place. And much like other places that people call home, those that live there want to keep it that way.
It’s really heartening to see youth-led action be successful in a court of law. I hope that this leads to more cases being brought around the world.
Experts previously predicted that a win for youths in Montana would set an important legal precedent for how courts can hold states accountable for climate inaction. The same legal organization representing Montana’s young plaintiffs, Our Children’s Trust, is currently pursuing similar cases in four other states, The Washington Post reported.
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Montana tried to argue that adjusting its energy policy and other statutes would have “no meaningful impact or appreciable effect,” the Post reported, because climate change is a global issue. Montana Assistant Attorney General Michael Russell described the testimony as a “week-long airing of political grievances that properly belong in the Legislature, not a court of law,” according to the Post. Notably, the state did not meaningfully attempt to dispute climate science.
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Experts told Scientific American that Montana’s emissions are significant given its population size, emitting in 2019 “about 32 million tons of carbon dioxide.” That’s “about as much as Ireland, which has a population six times larger,” Scientific American reported. Young people suing alleged that Montana had “never denied a permit for a fossil fuel project,” the Post reported. Source: Montana loses fight against youth climate activists in landmark ruling | Ars Technica
Coupled with this (cited) Slate article about what people did with their free time 20 years ago, it seems like Gen Z has gone beyond ‘touching grass’ to rediscover… errands?
I’m being facetious, but there’s some good points here about the tyranny of being able to do everything from your phone and the comfort of your bed/sofa. We live quite close to the middle of our small town, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than strolling into town to pick something up.
Also, the book mentioned, Four Thousand Weeks, is well worth reading. It’s excellent as a way to reflect on your philosophy of work/life.
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In ‘Four Thousand Weeks’, a philosophical book about time management by Oliver Burkeman, he explains something he calls “the efficiency trap,” whereby the more we do, the more there is to do. This is of course counter to the mythology of productivity, which tells us that the sooner we can get things done, the sooner we’ll be able to relax and enjoy ourselves. Instead, Burkeman argues that “what needs doing” simply “expands to fill the time available.” Become efficient at work and you’ll be given more work. Answer all your emails and you’ll get all the replies and more. Finally reach your goals and you’ll think of new ones. There’s not actually an end in sight, and so by placing our faith in ever-decreasing segments of time spent on individual to-dos, we simply create the opportunity to complete more errands in less time, and in a more boring way. This reality presents us with the following paradox: Because it now takes less time to do things, we have way too much to do.
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In Four Thousand Weeks, a philosophical book about time management by Oliver Burkeman, he explains something he calls “the efficiency trap,” whereby the more we do, the more there is to do. This is of course counter to the mythology of productivity, which tells us that the sooner we can get things done, the sooner we’ll be able to relax and enjoy ourselves. Instead, Burkeman argues that “what needs doing” simply “expands to fill the time available.” Become efficient at work and you’ll be given more work. Answer all your emails and you’ll get all the replies and more. Finally reach your goals and you’ll think of new ones. There’s not actually an end in sight, and so by placing our faith in ever-decreasing segments of time spent on individual to-dos, we simply create the opportunity to complete more errands in less time, and in a more boring way. This reality presents us with the following paradox: Because it now takes less time to do things, we have way too much to do. Source: #153: Rethinking “weekend plans” | Haley Nahman
Image: No Revisions
I run my life by Google Calendar, so I found this post about different data layers including both past and future data points really interesting.
As someone who also pays attention to their stress level as reported by a Garmin smartwatch, and as someone who suffers from migraines, this kind of data would be juxtaposition would be super-interesting to me.
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Flights, for example, should be native calendar objects with their own unique attributes to highlight key moments such as boarding times or possible delays.
This gets us to an interesting question: If our calendars were able to support other types of calendar activities, what else could we map onto them?
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Something I never really noticed before is that we only use our calendars to look forward in time, never to reflect on things that happened in the past. That feels like a missed opportunity.
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My biggest gripe with almost all quantified self tools is that they are input-only devices. They are able to collect data, but unable to return any meaningful output. My Garmin watch can tell my current level of stress based on my heart-rate variability, but not what has caused that stress or how I can prevent it in the future. It lacks context.
Once I view the data alongside other events, however, things start to make more sense. Adding workouts or meditation sessions, for example, would give me even more context to understand (and manage) stress.
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Once you start to see the calendar as a time machine that covers more than just future plans, you’ll realize that almost any activity could live in your calendar. As long as it has a time dimension, it can be visualized as a native calendar layer. Source: Multi-layered calendars | julian.digital
Too many pointless TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) in this blog post, but it’s redeemed by having a core message that human beings are not cogs in a machine and have a finite time to accomplish their goals.
Although there have been plenty of people I’ve come across in my career who are always “super busy” there’s one person in my orbit in particular at the moment who seems to carry the world on their shoulders. As this post points out, this is due to an inability to focus on what’s important.
(The diagram below exudes peak 1990s management consultancy vibes, so I’m only including it for comedy value.)
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[T]o have an effective personal strategy, you need to be deliberative about choosing where to deploy your limited available hours in tasks that your particular set of capabilities enable you to generate a win by creating disproportionate value for your organization. And, since this doesn’t happen automatically, you need a personal management system for doing it on an ongoing basis — because on this front, eternal vigilance is the price of effectiveness.
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Remember that strategy is what you do not what you say. So, even if you don’t think of yourself as having a personal Playing to Win strategy, step back and reverse engineer what it actually is based on what you actually do. Source: Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks | Roger Martin
In the last few days I rediscovered this post from Another Angry Woman via someone linking to it. I don’t think I shared it at the time, but it helped me understand how even well-meaning advice can be spectacularly unhelpful.
I’d recommend reading the whole thing, especially if you identify as male. However, the main takeaway for me was to ask if the person wants advice. Most recently, for example, I enquired if someone was “just venting or would like advice based on my experience”. They replied they were just venting.
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There is a gendered element to this, too. Mansplaining is something which most women on the internet have experienced fairly frequently. It is exhausting. It is patronising. It is the background hum of patriarchy.
You might not personally be mansplaining. Maybe you’re not even a man. But those who have been on the receiving end of mansplaining are sensitive to it. Your attempt to help can come across as mansplaining, and throw you straight into the draining and exhausting pile.
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When someone is not asking a question, they probably do not want advice. This means, you have not been invited to give it. Your advice is not welcome. No matter how much you think there’s a solution to their predicament or they could do things a little differently, you’ve not been invited to share your advice. So don’t. Source: How to give advice on the internet without being an utter menace | Another angry woman
Paul Graham is a smart guy. He’s a venture capitalist, and here he’s in conversation with Tyler Cowen, an economist. Both men are further to the right, politically, than me — so I winced a little at their references to the ‘far left’.
That being said, it’s an interesting episode and Cowen’s rapid-fire questioning is a useful tactic for getting guests to be more candid than they would otherwise be. What I found fascinating about Graham’s responses was that he would often say “I don’t know” instead of the prosaic “that’s a great question”. I guess once you’ve got the standing he has, there’s no need for him to pretend otherwise.
This article popped up on my feeds a couple of weeks ago and I recognised the organisation behind the website. Having listened to an excellent Art of Manliness podcast episode featuring Dr John Barry, I knew that ‘The Centre for Male Psychology’ is actually legit.
What this article discusses I’ve found true in my own life. I am by temperament introspective, which means for many years I thought the answer to any form of melancholy came in thinking. But, actually, I’ve found the answer to be in action in doing things such as climbing mountains, running, and doing things with my hands.
When a man talks about how he operated a lathe, did some welding, restored a bit of discarded and broken furniture, might he be sharing a strategy of how he successfully redirected suicidal feelings? Perhaps we should not be so quick to shut down these conversations with accusations of being work obsessed, effectively stymieing natural male expressions with injunctions to talk less about activities and to communicate more effusively with feelings words. For many men, activities are the preferred canvases on which they can process feelings and carve out some genuine psychological equilibrium.
This is probably a reason why men talk so much about work, sports, building things, computer games, recreational activities – it may be their preferred way of communicating the ways they wrestle with psychological issues. Sadly, the therapeutic industry is quick to chastise men’s preference for intelligent actions, conflating them with pathological reflexes such as unconscious acts of aggression, dependence on drugs and booze, and other destructive versions of so-called “acting-out” as they are so often branded. Source: Men tend to regulate their emotions through actions rather than words | The Centre for Male Psychology
For various reasons I will explain elsewhere this post by Dan Sinker, which I read this morning, was particularly important to my life. Dan is awesome, and am thankful for his candor.
And so it was on that night that my brain—sometimes a friend, other times an enemy—responded “Well, I’m marginally employed,” before launching into a full-throated explanation of the wild world of Question Mark, Ohio to increasingly concerned onlookers.
I left the cookout feeling pretty weird, if I’m being honest. Since I’d last seen most of the folks that were there, they’d moved on to really incredible work. And here I was cobbling together bits and pieces of job-shaped things while spinning a yarn about a town plagued with disappearances. And then there was the term I used: marginally employed, which felt right but also felt a little embarrassing.
And then something happened. I talked about this on Says Who afterward and I heard from a bunch of folks who said, basically: Hey, me too. And I realized like, wait a second: I want to be doing work like I’m doing. Work that’s weird and exciting and, admittedly, hard to describe to people while also gnawing on some ribs. I don’t want to be doing a 9-5. I want to be marginally employed.
And so I made a patch. It’s really simple, just maroon on white and set in Cooper Black, my very favorite typeface. It reads, simply, “Marginally Employed.” No apologies, no frills. I love it. You might too. It’s $10 and ships free in the US. Source: Best Laid Plans | dansinker.com
While I’m aware of medieval almshouses, I didn’t know they were still a thing. It’s great that there’s more being built now than in Victorian times, and I hope this kind of approach, along with co-operative housing, becomes even more of a thing.
It looks like they could be particularly useful for helping everything from ending rough sleeping, to stopping premature deaths in old age from poverty.
Thanks to Laura for pointing me towards this post by Simone Stolzoff. There’s so much to unpack, which perhaps I’ll do in a separate post. It touches on reputation and credentialing, but also motivation, gamification, and “value self-determination”.
Extracting yourself from the false gods of vanity metrics is hard, but massively liberating. It starts with realising small things like you don’t actually need to keep up a ‘streak’ on Duolingo to learn a language. But there’s a through line from that to coming to the conclusion that you don’t need to win awards for your work, or the status symbol of a fancy car/house.
How do so many of us find ourselves in this position, climbing ladders we don’t truly want to be on? C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher and game design researcher at the University of Utah, has some answers. Nguyen coined the term “value capture,” a phenomenon that I came to see all around me after I learned about it. Here’s how it works.
Most games establish a world with a clear goal and rankable achievements: Pac-Man must eat all the dots; Mario must save the princess. Video games offer what Nguyen calls “a seductive level of value clarity.” Get points, defeat the boss, win. In many ways, video games are the only true meritocratic games people can play. Everyone plays within clearly defined boundaries, with the same set of inputs. The most skilled wins.
Our careers are different. The games we play with our working hours also come with their own values and metrics that matter. Success is measured by how much money you make—for your company and for yourself. Promotions, bonuses, and raises mark the path to success, like dots along the Pac-Man maze.
These metrics are seductive because of their simplicity. “You might have a nuanced personal definition of success,” Nguyen told me, “but once someone presents you with these simple quantified representations of a value—especially ones that are shared across a company—that clarity trumps your subtler values.” In other words, it is easier to adopt the values of the game than to determine your own. That’s value capture.
There are countless examples of value capture in daily life. You get a Fitbit because you want to improve your health but become obsessed with maximizing your steps. You become a professor in order to inspire students but become fixated on how often your research is cited. You join Twitter because you want to connect with others but become preoccupied by the virality of your content. Naturally, maximizing your steps or citations or retweets is good for the platforms on which these status games are played. Source: Playing a Career Game You Actually Want to Win | Every
Not just artists - we all go through life’s ups and downs, good periods and bad. Right now is the least tolerant time since I’ve been alive. Everyone’s supposed to be on it 24/7.
Purdue University had something like this almost a decade ago, but there’s even more call for this kind of thing now, post-pandemic and in a Verifiable Credentials landscape.
Everyone’s addicted to marrying ‘skills’ with ‘jobs’ but I think there’s definitely an Open Recognition aspect to all of this.
A digital wallet, like ASU Pocket, holds verifiable credentials – which are digital representations of real-world credentials like government-issued IDs, passports, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, educational degrees, professional certifications, awards, and so on. In the past, these credentials have been stored in physical form, making them susceptible to fraud and loss. However, with advances in technology, these credentials can be stored electronically, using cryptographic techniques to ensure their authenticity. This makes it possible to verify the credential without revealing sensitive information, such as a social security number.
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At ASU Pocket, we also view verifiable credentials as an important tool for social impact. They provide a way for people to document their skills and accomplishments, which can be used to gain new opportunities. For example, someone with a verifiable skill credential for customer service might be able to use it to get a job in a call center. Likewise, someone with a verifiable credential for computer programming might be able to use it to get a job as a software developer.
In both cases, the verifiable credential provides a way for the individual to demonstrate their skills and qualifications gained through or outside of traditional learning pathways. This is especially impactful for marginalized groups who may have difficulty obtaining traditional credentials, such as degrees or certifications. Source: ASU Pocket: A digital wallet to capture learners’ real-time achievements
Yes, it’s “just typing prompts” but then drawing is “just making marks on paper”. Love this aesthetic.
Source: An Improbable Future
I love this essay, not because I necessarily agree with it, but because I agree with the vibe of it. It’s from 2019, so it must have come via my social feeds.
Keith Pandolfi used to own a coffee shop which served the best barista-crafted flat whites, etc. in the area. These days he drinks Maxwell House. Likewise, there’s areas of my life in which I’ve gone from being very fussy to not really caring. It’s the letting go that matters.
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I don’t have memories of… bonding experiences taking place over a flat white at a Manhattan coffee shop or a $5 cup of nitro iced coffee at a Brooklyn cafe. High-end coffee doesn’t usually lend itself to such moments. Instead, it’s something to be fussed over and praised; you talk more about its origin and its roaster, its flavor notes and its brewing method than you talk to the person you’re enjoying it with. Bad coffee is the stuff you make a full pot of on the weekends just in case some friends stop by. It’s what you sip when you’re alone at the mechanic’s shop getting your oil change, thinking about where your life has taken you; what you nurse as you wait for a loved one to get through a tough surgery. It’s the Sanka you share with an elderly great aunt while listening to her tell stories you’ve heard a thousand times before. Bad coffee is there for you. It is bottomless. It is perfect. Source: The Case for Bad Coffee | Serious Eats
There’s some discussion of students ‘gaming the system’ in this article about ungrading university courses, but nothing much about AI tools like ChatGPT. This movement has been gathering pace for years, and I think that we’re at a tipping point.
Hopefully, this will lead to more Open Recognition practices rather than just breaking down chunky credentials into microcredentials.
“Grades are not a representation of student learning, as hard as it is for us to break the mindset that if the student got an A it means they learned,” said Jody Greene, special adviser to the provost for educational equity and academic success at UCSC, where several faculty are experimenting with various forms of un-grading.
If a student already knew the material before taking the class and got that A, “they didn’t learn anything,” said Greene. And “if the student came in and struggled to get a C-plus, they may have learned a lot.”
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[S]everal colleges and universities… already practice unconventional forms of grading. At Reed College in Oregon, students aren’t shown their grades so that they can “focus on learning, not on grades,” the college says. Students at New College of Florida complete contracts establishing their goals, then get written evaluations about how they’re doing. And students at Brown University in Rhode Island have a choice among written evaluations that only they see, results of “satisfactory” or “no credit,” and letter grades — A, B or C, but no D or F.
MIT has what it calls “ramp-up grading” for first-year students. In their first semesters, they get only a “pass,” without a letter; if they don’t pass, no grade is recorded at all. In their second semesters, they get letter grades, but grades of D and F are not recorded on their transcripts. Source: Some colleges are eliminating freshman grades by ‘ungrading’ | NPR
Blocking advertising on the web is not only good for increasing the speed and privacy of your own web browsing, but also good for the planet.
The results are insightful: up to 70% of the electricity consumption (and therefore carbon emissions) caused by visiting a French media site is triggered by advertisements and stats. Therefore, using an ad blocker even becomes an ecological gesture.
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Overall we observe the same thing: the carbon footprint of a website decreases if there are no ads or trackers on the website. The difference is significant: Between 32% and 70% of the energy consumed by the browser and the network is due to monetization.
The websites analyzed generate between 70 and 130 million visits per month, and their work has therefore a real impact on the environment.
Reducing the consumption of one of these sites by only 10% (20mWh), per visit for a site with 100 million monthly visitors is equivalent to saving 24,000 kWh per year. Source: Media Websites: 70% of the Carbon Footprint Caused by Ads and Stats | Marmelab
It’s not often I’ll post tools here, but after a few days of using it, I’m sold on the Arc browser.
My web browser history over the last quarter of a century goes something like: Netscape Navigator –> Internet Explorer –> Firefox –> Chrome –> Brave –> Arc.
Perhaps I should record a screencast, but the three things I like most about Arc are:
Cory Doctorow is doing the rounds for his new book at the moment. But because he’s Cory, he’s not just phoning it in, or parroting the same lines.
Take this interview in Jacobin, for example. Yes, he’s talking about why he decided to write a story about crypto, but he’s so well informed about this stuff on a technical level that it’s a joy to read the way he explains things.
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A lot of the crypto stuff starts with what a sleight-of-hand artist would do. “Alright, we know that cryptography works and can keep secrets and we know that money is just an agreement among people to treat something as valuable. What if we could use that secrecy when processing payments and in so doing prevent governments from interrupting payments?”
After this setup, the con artist can get the mark to pick his or her poison: “It will stop big government from interfering with the free market” or “It will stop US hegemony from interdicting individuals who are hostile to American interests in other countries and allow them to make transactions” or “It will let you send money to dissident whistleblowers who are being blocked by Visa and American Express.” These are all applications that, depending on the mark’s political views, will affirm the rightness of the endeavor. The mark will think, that is a totally legitimate application.
It starts with a sleight of hand because all the premises that the mark is agreeing with are actually only sort of right. It’s a first approximation of right and there are a lot of devils in the details. And understanding those details requires a pretty sophisticated technical understanding.
In a Twitter thread by Paul Graham that I came across via Hacker News he discusses how it’s always safe to bet on human laziness. Ergo, most writing will be AI-generated in a year’s time.
However, as he says, to write is to think. So while it’s important to learn how to use AI tools, it’s also important to learn how to write.
In this post by Alan Levine, he complains about ChatGPT’s inability to write good code. But the most interesting paragraph (cited below) is the last one in which we, consciously or unconsciously, put the machine on the pedestal and try and cajole it into doing something we can already do.
I’m reading Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell at the moment, so I feel like all of this links to humanism in some way. But I’ll save those thoughts until later and I’ve finished the book.
And the thing I am worried about is that in this process, knowing I was likely getting wrong results, I clung to hope it would work. I also found myself skipping my own reasoning and thinking, in the rush to refine my prompts. Source: Lying, Hallucinating? I, MuddGPT | CogDogBlog
I think I’ve always been somewhat of a Georgist, but perhaps didn’t know the name for it. The central tenet is that governments should be funded by a tax on land rather than labour.
There’s also the idea that this tax would replace all other taxes, which I guess is kind of the mirror of Universal Basic Income replacing all other benefits. I’m happy to be convinced on that, but already sold on the land tax idea.
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If I claimed to own a 1-dimensional line that ran on the ground, and that you need to step over it, or that I owned a 6-inch cube floating off the ground, and you needed to duck under it, you’d rightly think I was insane.
However, if I own a plot of land, i.e. a 2D space on the surface of the earth, it’s considered either insane (or tragically primitive) to not believe in this.
(Yes, through air rights you own 3D space, but it generally has to be above 2D land, floating cubes still seem nonsensical). Source: Developing an intuition for Georgism | Atoms vs Bits
Image: Gautier Pfeiffer
This article, which I discovered via Sentiers, discusses the rise of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics’, or putting numbers on things you like to prove other people wrong. It’s basically numbers as a shorthand for status, and once you realise it, you see it everywhere. It’s the social media-ification of all of the things.
On one level, this is seen in a rise of a kind of wonky obsession with business stats in fandoms, invoked as a way to convey the rightness of artistic opinions—what I want to call Quantitative Aesthetics. (There are actually scientists who study aesthetic preference in labs and use the term “quantitative aesthetics.” I am using it in a more diffuse way.)
It manifests in music. As the New York Times wrote in 2020 of the new age of pop fandom, “devotees compare No. 1s and streaming statistics like sports fans do batting averages, championship, wins and shooting percentages.” Last year, another music writer talked about fans internalizing the number-as-proof-of-value mindset to extreme levels: “I see people forcing themselves to listen to certain songs or albums over and over and over just to raise those numbers, to the point they don’t even get enjoyment out of it anymore.”
The same goes for film lovers, who now seem to strangely know a lot about opening-day grosses and foreign box office, and use the stats to argue for the merits of their preferred product. There was an entire campaign by Marvel super-fans to get Avengers: Endgame to outgross Avatar, as if that would prove that comic-book movies really were the best thing in the world.
On the flip side, indie director James Gray, of Ad Astra fame, recently complained about ordinary cinema-goers using business stats as a proxy for artistic merit: “It tells you something of how indoctrinated we are with capitalism that somebody will say, like, ‘His movies haven’t made a dime!’ It’s like, well, do you own stock in Comcast? Or are you just such a lemming that you think that actually has value to anybody?”
David Cain at Raptitude has a post which is somewhat bizarrely entitled 10 Things I Want to Communicate to the Human Species Before I Die. The first point is about shopping trolleys, so I’m not sure how tongue-in-cheek it all is.
Anyway, without saying whether I agree or disagree with any of the other statements, I want to draw attention to the last one. Ruminating is a complete waste of time, and as someone susceptible to it I want to +1 the advice to get out of your head and listen if you’re succumbing to it.
For me, that often means listening to my iPod in the early hours of the morning while lying sleepless in bed. But it can mean listening to other people, or just your surroundings.
I’m not going to gush as I’ve had it installed mere hours, but this article persuaded me to actually use the invite code I’d got for the Arc browser. First impressions were good enough for it to replace Brave as my default, for the time being, on my Mac Studio.
My colleague Laura always has tabs for client projects to hand, as she has a Firefox extension which separates tab groups. Arc does this quickly, seamlessly, and by default. Also, I used to have my tabs at the side of my browser and I’m not sure why or how I got out of the habit of doing so.
There are lots of other nice things about Arc which are mentioned in the review. It’s Chromium-based, so everything just works, including bringing across your bookmarks, saved passwords, and browsing history.
[…]
If the sidebar is Arc’s most prominent interface element, Spaces is the feature that leverages it more than anything else in Arc. A Space is a collection of tabs in the sidebar. It’s easy to switch between them using keyboard shortcuts (Control-1, Control-2, etc., or Command-Option-Left/Right Arrow) or by clicking little icons at the bottom of the sidebar.
You can assign each Space a color, providing an instant visual clue for what Space you’re in. For me, Personal is a green/yellow/teal gradient, TidBITS is purple, and FLRC is blue, while my fourth space—set to hold FLRC tabs for Google Docs and Google Sheets—is yellow. Each Space can also have a custom emoji or icon that identifies it in the switcher at the bottom of the sidebar.
[…]
The most obvious part of Arc’s visual interface is its sidebar. As I said earlier, the sidebar provides access to multiple color-coded Spaces, each with its own collection of tabs. It’s easy to gloss over the importance of putting tabs in a sidebar, but that would be a mistake. Sidebar tabs aren’t simply a vertical version of tabs across the top of the browser window, they’re substantively better.
[…]
But what the sidebar really provides is a sense of comfort, of familiarity. There’s a French phrase, mise en place, that refers to setting out all your ingredients and tools before cooking so everything you need is at hand when you need it. Arc’s sidebar, when populated with the pinned tabs you use and arranged the way you think, provides that sense of mise en place. I actually want to sit down at Arc because it helps me channel my thoughts and actions toward my goals for the day. Source: Arc Will Change the Way You Work on the Web | TidBITS
I spend most of my time coordinating with one other human being at work. After that, I’m coordinating with a maximum of three other people internally, and then with clients.
So take what I’ve got to say about Kanban with a pinch of salt. But I’ve worked at bigger organisations, with more fancy methodologies. Still, nothing beats having a board which shows what’s to do, doing, and done (with some tweaks perhaps for ‘feedback needed’ and ‘undead’!)
[…]
[B]ecause Kanban focuses on tasks rather than sprint-sized batches, it pushes responsibility to the edges of the team, meaning engineers are responsible for going after the pieces of information they need to move forward.
When that happens, instead of designing features by committee, which demands a significant amount of back-and-forth discussions, decisions happen locally, and thus are easier to make.
Additionally, fewer people making decisions lead to fewer assumptions. Fewer assumptions, in turn, lead to shipping smaller pieces of software more quickly, allowing teams to truncate bad paths earlier. Source: You don’t need Scrum. You just need to do Kanban right. | Lucas F. Costa
Image: Visual Thinkery for WAO
I’ve come across so much great art and artists that are either directly or obliquely protesting the coronation, monarchy, and everything the Tories stand for. Here’s one from Robert Montgomery which, I think, is actually from the queen’s jubilee.
Source: BILLBOARDS — ROBERT MONTGOMERY
Abi Handley (second from the left in this photo) is an inspiration to me and others in the co-op movement. It was a little surprising, therefore, when she told me a couple of months ago that she was stepping down from being a member of Outlandish. After all, she’s been with them for 12 years, almost since the beginning.
As this blog post explains, however, part of understanding the dynamics within a co-operative is to know when to take the reins, and when to step back. She’ll continue to collaborate with Outlandish, but also more than others. This is great for us, and in fact she joined WAO during our last monthly co-op day to explore opportunities.
Congrats, Abi! Onwards and upwards 💪
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Integrity for me is one of the most important principles I try and live by. Modelling the behaviours and values I hold dear for me is the only true way I want to be. Being able to genuinely live and breathe what I support my clients to try in terms of ways of working is essential for me to be an authentic and valuable coach & facilitator. I need to do what I say to others to try (because I believe and see that it works when everyone opts in), always and in every team I work in.
I have struggled in letting go of the role of ‘Mum’ in Outlandish, despite desperately wanting to, and that is not a solo challenge – it is also incredibly difficult to change those kinds of dynamics within any group. By me stepping down, I am modelling the need to not be at the centre of all things Outlandish, because despite trying with all our might, it is so easy to step into the safe role of looking after things when its not going so well or a challenge comes up for us. I don’t think that serves my goals, nor Outlandish’s. I think the best way we can achieve Outlandish being even more co-operative than it already is, is by me stepping back. That’s a scary thing to do for us all, but I’m going to take the risk and be excited about what might happen, for all of us. Source: Abi is stepping down from being a member of Outlandish | Outlandish blog
As part of the #NotMyKing protests, I came across a printmaker and artist whose work I explored further. Highly discouraged by my wife from putting up something explicitly anti-monarchy, I instead placed this from Katherine Anteney on view through the window of my home office.
It’s from a Brazilian anti-dictatorship protest song from the 1970s and roughly translated as: “Everything is good, everything is great, but what happens tomorrow, mate, when they take your carnival away?"
Seems appropriate for this weekend, anyway.
Source: Comportamento Geral | Katherine Anteney
As new platforms try to imitate existing ones, it becomes more challenging for users to find unique and diverse voices (and content).
So it’s important for users, developers, and investors to encourage innovation and diversity in online spaces, instead of solely focusing on creating platforms that trap users and prioritise profit.
You know, the internet still has the potential to be a place for connection, surprise, and delight. But it requires a collective effort to resist the monopolistic tendencies of a few dominant players.
[…]
The death of Google Reader is much bemoaned by bloggers like myself, many of whom believe that its end was why blogs died. That’s a beautiful revisionist history that I won’t be taking part in here. Google Reader, which was essentially a very well-designed RSS feed with a mild interactive component, died because Google decided they didn’t want to play the game in the way that its founders had said they’d play it. Those ethical foundations proved extremely easy to discard once some shiny new companies, most notably Facebook and Twitter, began raking in billions of dollars.
[…]
The reason the death of Google Reader matters, here, is that it marks a pivotal moment in the deliberate and engineered shrinking of the internet. When Google Reader died, article discovery shifted. People were no longer reading RSS feeds, finding new sites, following them, and being updated when those sites posted. Instead, they were scrolling on the endless feed of Twitter, and (at the time) Facebook, and they got whatever they got.
[…]
It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.
Source: The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small | Defector
New York’s Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) demonstrates the strength of grassroots movements and the potential of publicly owned utilities to lead the way in the adoption of renewable energy.
This serves as a reminder that decentralised power structures can be more agile and responsive to the needs of the public. When communities have a say in decision-making processes, they can make bold moves towards a sustainable future, create new jobs, and ensure equitable access to clean, affordable energy. ✊
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The Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) will ensure that all state-owned properties that ordinarily receive power from the New York power authority (NYPA) are run on renewable energy by 2030. It will also require municipally owned properties – including many hospitals and schools, as well as public housing and public transit – to switch to renewable energy by 2035.
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The passage of this first-of-its-kind law comes after years of grassroots campaigning by climate and environmental organizers in New York state.
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Historically, when utilities are owned by investors, profits go to shareholders. But in publicly owned models, profits are reinvested in the utility’s operations. Rates on energy bills are also generally lower.
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The newly passed law also ensures creation of union jobs for the renewable projects, guaranteeing pay rate protection, offering retraining, and making sure that new positions are filled with workers who have lost or would be losing employment in the non-renewable energy sector. Source: New York takes big step toward renewable energy in ‘historic’ climate win | The Guardian
I’ve got two things to say about this article in The Economist. One is to do with alternative credentialing, and the other is to do with my first degree.
In England 25% of male graduates and 15% of female ones will take home less money over their careers than peers who do not get a degree, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a research outfit. America has less comprehensive data but has begun publishing the share of students at thousands of institutions who do not manage to earn more than the average high-school graduate early on. Six years after enrolment, 27% of students at a typical four-year university fail to do so, calculate researchers at Georgetown University in Washington, dc. In the long tail, comprising the worst 30% of America’s two- and four-year institutions, more than half of people who enroll lag this benchmark.
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Earnings data in Britain call into question the assumption that bright youngsters will necessarily benefit from being pushed towards very selective institutions, says Jack Britton of the ifs. In order to beat fierce competition for places, some youngsters apply for whatever subject seems easiest, even if it is not one that usually brings a high return. Parents fixated on getting their offspring into Oxford or Cambridge, regardless of subject, should take note. But there is also evidence that tackling a high-earning course for the sake of it can backfire. Norwegian research finds that students whose true desire is to study humanities, but who end up studying science, earn less after ten years than they probably otherwise would have.
I like this idea a lot. The only caveat is that we could potentially be ruled by “the will of the people” in a way that degenerates into the worst kind of populism.
However, I get the feeling that if this happens often enough, in practice it would be at worst benign, and at best a net benefit to democracy.
Underneath each idea it says “strongly disagree,” “disagree,” “agree,” “strongly agree,” etc. It feels like one of those online questionnaires you’ve seen many times before.
At the bottom of the form, you are invited to highlight the five proposals you care about most. Every citizen in your country on voting day would be looking at the same list and doing what you are doing in the voting booth: rating and ranking proposals. The goal is to establish a list of shared priorities.
The process looks like a referendum, a process you might’ve participated in before. But where a referendum asks you for a straight yes or no answer to a certain question, this new process — this preferendum — has a much richer interface for indicating your policy preferences. You get to translate your individual preferences into the collective priorities of your community. Source: Democracy’s Missing Link | NOEMA
I listened to a podcast episode earlier this week entitled What the World of Psychology Gets Wrong About Men. After a few minutes, I considered turning it off, as I felt that the guest, Dr. John Barry, was about to stray into “men are under attack” territory.
But I kept listening, and I was wrong. It was a really balanced, well-structured conversation which pointed out how problematic the term “toxic masculinity” is when it’s applied to any behaviour we don’t like that’s exhibited by men. That’s not how the phrase originated.
This article is a review of Richard Reeves' new book. What struck me about it was the discussion of how young men’s veneration of hugely problematic figures such as Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, and Donald Trump is a symptom of male alienation. “Women’s lives have been recast. Men’s lives have not.”
As a result, many men are struggling to fulfill their own outmoded expectations of what a man should be. “The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it has ‘gone too far,’” Reeves writes. “It is that it has not gone far enough”—that is, it has not succeeded in replacing traditional models of masculinity with something more adequate to our current circumstances. The Western male is stuck in a culture of masculinity that is now desperately mismatched with his material reality. “Women’s lives have been recast,” Reeves writes. “Men’s lives have not.” Men have been consigned to “cultural redundancy.”
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Addressing the kind of male disadvantages that Reeves catalogs does not mean ignoring or excusing inequalities that favor men over women. It’s possible, Reeves writes, to “hold two thoughts in our head at once.” Indeed, it’s urgent that we do so. Source: Have Men Become Culturally Redundant? | Commonweal Magazine
A remarkably sober look at the need for regulation, transparency around how models are trained, and costs in the world of AI. It makes a really good point about the UX required for machine learning to be useful at scale.
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Augmenting work with AI could be worthwhile despite these problems. This was certainly true of the computing revolution: Many people need training to use Word and Excel, but few would propose typewriters or graph paper as a better alternative. Still, it’s clear that a future in which “we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones,” is more than six months away, as the Future of Life Institute’s letter frets. The AI revolution is unfolding right now—and will still be unfolding a decade from today. Source: AI Can’t Take Over Everyone’s Jobs Soon (If Ever) | IEEE Spectrum
The album ‘Homework’ by Daft Punk came out in 1997 when I was 16 years old. That’s the same age as my son is now. I think it’s fair to say that it changed my life.
When I worked in HMV as a student, I used my access to the huge database to discover and order in rare Japan-only releases of Daft Punk’s music. I also discovered music that the duo behind Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, released on their own labels.
I was sad when I learned that Daft Punk was to be no more, but reading this interview with Thomas Bangalter in The Guardian helps make sense. I think it’s particularly important in life not to become a caricature of yourself. For Bangalter going from scoring a film like Irréversible to ballet couldn’t be more different, really.
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I love that this article channels both Tracey Ullman’s excellent book Close to the Machine and the weird allure of spreadsheets. I have a love/hate relationship with the latter, I have to say.
The key point that this article makes, which I think a few of us realised even before the pandemic, is that the web is fragmentary by default. Huge silos of common experience will come and go, and that’s OK.
If we were to wipe the slate clean—no more platform-specific formats, no more slick UIs, no more engagement-capturing algorithms—would web users even know what to make online? The question has felt particularly acute these past few months, as Twitter users flounder to figure out where to go next, even as they still feel tethered to the increasingly broken platform. Setting aside the very real issue of building a critical mass of users on another site, the question of what to do on another site runs through many of these conversations. In an ideal world, what would a platform allow a user to do?
Creation on the web has always been about those constraints, whether technical limitations or the specific ways systems were designed. By the late ’90s, the web had grown much more participatory than the one Ellen Ullman was writing about. With a little HTML and CSS, ordinary users could create all sorts of things on the proverbial blank page—so long it was mostly text, with maybe a few low-res images or the occasional sparkly animated gif. The first decade of the 2000s saw the rise of both social networking and blogging, but even as technical capabilities were rapidly expanding, for the average user it was far less of a free-for-all than the DIY spirit of the early years. The Web 2.0 shift to user-generated content centered the user—but it was on the platforms’ terms. And in an effort to make content creation as “user-friendly” as possible, platforms were once again, after the openness of the webring/Geocities era, building narrow pathways for users to take.
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But constraints on the web today aren’t just about what our tools encourage us to do on a technical level—they’re also about what it’s like, more broadly, to use a platform. “On the old-school internet that I was on when I was a teenager, the constraints were the tools,” says [Michael Ann DeVito, a postdoctoral computing innovation fellow in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder]. “Could you create a hit viral video in 1996? No, we did not have the technology and infrastructure to get that video distributed. For a one-minute video, you would spend two days uploading it, and nobody would have had the connection to download it. The systems didn’t afford that kind of expression.”
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The ideal solution likely lies in multiplicity: no massively scaled platform can do everything, so why continue trying to make one size only sort of fit all? Fragmenting our social and creative platforms wouldn’t just expand the ways we could share things with the world; a greater variety of affordances—and yes, constraints as well—would give us a greater range of pathways into creativity. As the current big platforms rush to copy each other (or, more to the point, copy TikTok), the idea of smaller, more varied platforms might feel antithetical; so, too, might the idea that the tech industry would be willing to invest in something that won’t endlessly grow. But the current platform malaise won’t be solved by scale and brute force. Users have many different needs, and in the next era of the web, they should be offered many different solutions.
The author of this post really needs to read Thomas Kuhn’s The Theory of Scientific Revolutions and some Marshall McLuhan (especially on tetrads).
What he’s describing here is to do with mindsets, the attempt we make to try and fit ‘the phenomena’ into our existing mental models. When that doesn’t work, there’s a crisis, and we have to come up with new paradigms.
But, more than that, to use McLuhan’s phrase, we “march backwards into the future” always looking to the past to make sense of the present — and future.
For example, some new technology, like the automobile, the internet, or mobile computing, gets introduced. We first try to fit it into the world as it currently exists: The car is a mechanical horse; the mobile internet is the desktop internet on a smaller screen. But we very quickly figure out that this new technology enables some completely new way of living. The geography of lives can be completely different; we can design an internet that is exclusively built for our phones. Before the technology arrived, we wanted improvements on what we had, like the proverbial faster horse. After, we invent things that were unimaginable before—how would you explain everything about TikTok to someone from the eighties? Each new breakthrough is a discontinuity, and teleports us to a new world—and, for companies, into a new competitive game—that would’ve been nearly impossible to anticipate from our current world.
Artificial intelligence, it seems, will be the next discontinuity. That means it won’t tack itself onto our lives as they are today, and tweak them around the edges; it will yank us towards something that is entirely different and unfamiliar.
AI will have the same effect on the data ecosystem. We’ll initially try to insert LLMs into the game we’re currently playing, by using them to help us write SQL, create documentation, find old dashboards, or summarize queries.
But these changes will be short-lived. Over time, we’ll find novel things to do with AI, just as we did with the cloud and cloud data warehouses. Our data models won’t be augmented by LLMs; they’ll be built for LLMs. We won’t glue natural language inputs on top of our existing interfaces; natural language will become the default way we interact with computers. If a bot can write data documentation on demand for us, what’s the point of writing it down at all? And we’re finally going to deliver on the promise of self-serve BI in ways that are profoundly different than what we’ve tried in the past. Source: The new philosophers | Benn Stancil
Slavoj Žižek is never the easiest academic to read, and this (translated) article about ChatGPT and AI is no different. However, if you skip the bizarre introduction, I do think he makes an interesting point about people being able to blame AI’s for ambiguity and misunderstandings.
Therefore, the AI “offers no solution to segregation and the fundamental isolation and antagonism we still suffer from, since without responsibility, there can be no post-givenness.” Rousselle introduced the term “post-givenness” to denote “field of ambiguity and linguistic uncertainty that allows a reaching out to the other in the field of what is known as the non-rapport. It thus deals directly with the question of impossibility as we relate to the other. It is about dealing with our neighbour’s opaque monstrosity that can never be effaced even as we reach out to them on the best terms.”
[…]
“We dream outside of ourselves today, and hence that systems like ChatGPT and the Metaverse operate by offering themselves the very space we have lost due to the old castrative models falling by the wayside.” With the digitized unconscious we get a direct in(ter)vention of the unconscious - but then why are we not overwhelmed by the unbearable closeness of jouissance (enjoyment), as is the case with psychotics? Source: ChatGPT Says What Our Unconscious Radically Represses | Sublation Magazine
I’m hugely supportive of people choosing therapies such as CBT and using language from NVC. However, it’s possible to go too far.
My wife has told me “not to use that language” with her before when she thinks that I’m using it in a way that doesn’t feel in some way natural. And it seems that it’s particularly prevalent in younger generations? Interesting article.
It’s important to be able to set boundaries and advocate for yourself. Occasionally, though, the emphasis on protecting one’s individual needs can overlook the fact that someone else is on other side of that boundary-setting. In 2019, for instance, a relationship coach’s Twitter thread offering a template for telling friends in need of support that you’re “at capacity” at the moment drew criticism for equating friendship to emotional labor. Earlier this year, a clinical psychologist’s TikTok video outlining how to break up with a friend went viral after viewers pointed out that it sounded like a missive from HR. Critics have noted that personal relationships require a touch more compassion than some of these therapeutic blueprints offer.
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There are reasons a person might be tempted to overindulge in some of this self-care behavior. Conflict can be difficult, and people might think they can avoid it by asserting their needs in a way that prevents the other person from responding — by using HR language to end a friendship, for instance, or via straight-up ghosting. And by couching the behavior in therapy language, the hard “boundary” can feel more legitimate, or even virtuous.
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Beyond boundary-setting and inflexibility, the proliferation of therapy speak has also inspired some people to assign labels like “toxic” and “narcissistic” to certain relationships or behaviors. Though toxic people and narcissists do exist, these armchair diagnoses don’t always accurately capture every dynamic, and being on the receiving end of this language can be destabilizing when it’s misplaced. Source: Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?
This article frames ultra-rich people owning and using superyachts and private jets as ‘theft’ because it reduces the amount of time we’ve got to avert climate disaster.
Yes, it is.
But it’s also theft because the purchase of these yachts and jets are only possible because of the enormous sums of money stolen from workers to fund their extravagant lifestyles.
On an individual basis, the superrich pollute far more than the rest of us, and travel is one of the biggest parts of that footprint. Take, for instance, Rising Sun, the 454-foot, 82-room megaship owned by the DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen. According to a 2021 analysis in the journal Sustainability, the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.
And that’s just a single ship. Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht. This fleet pollutes as much as entire nations: The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitants. Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.
This article in The Cut by Kathryn Jezer-Morton is fantastic. There’s a tension in parenting between, on the one hand, giving your kids space to grow, be themselves, and make mistakes — and, on the other, looking out for them, being time-efficient, and avoiding the opprobrium of other parents.
I also wonder if we misunderstand some of the motivations for helicopter parenting. We assume it’s an anxiety response, and I’m sure that explains a lot of it, but it’s also the path of least resistance.
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Illustration: Hannah Buckman
My son’s revising for exams at the moment. I used to be a teacher. One of the things that I’m trying to get across to him is the importance of ‘spaced repetition’.
This post is interesting because it takes that idea and suggests that the best newsletters are ones that help you understand key concepts by giving examples on a regular basis. The author suggests that, in this way, you can effectively write a book.
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One thing I wonder about is which kinds of topics are better served by newsletters, and which are better served by books. Presumably if you’re creating a complex argument that requires the reader to hold in mind various ideas that build together, a book is a better fit than a newsletter.
However, many books I read strike me as having One Big Point and then a long series of examples, and in that case I suspect a newsletter dribbling out the examples might be better for reader retention.
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We spend so much time reading that it always makes me sad to think that including a little more repetition would have disproportionate impact on our ability to remember and relate to the information we’ve read. In theory we could be note-taking and flash-carding after reading, but this (frankly) feels more like a chore than a pleasure. At their best, “repetitive” newsletters are one way to achieve the same goal less aversively. Source: Spaced Repetition Through Newsletters | Atoms vs Bits
Image: Midjourney (see alt text for prompt)
I’ve read a lot of danah boyd’s work over the years, especially given how her research interests intersect with my work. In this long-ish post, she argues for an approach to AI driven by curiosity and the concept of ‘projectories’ (subject to guardrails).
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At least in my circles, there’s been a lot of talk about parasocial relationships over the last decade or so. Usually, the discussion is descriptive and simply observing the phenomenon.
In this article for The Atlantic, Arthur C. Brooks does a bit of analysis in terms of seeing parasocial relationships as a type of avoidant behaviour.
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Although there are no exact statistics on frequency that I have found, psychologists do document cases of parasocial relationships that can go much deeper, with significant consequences. Scholars note that parasocial bonds exist on a continuum of intensity, from entertainment-social (say, gossiping about a celebrity) to intense-personal (intense feelings toward a celebrity) to borderline-pathological (uncontrollable behavior and fantasies). At the deepest level, the parasocial relationship can be dangerous, such as when a fan loses touch with reality and stalks a star, under the delusion that they have a real-life connection.
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In 2021, two psychologists from York University, in Canada, found that forming parasocial bonds was strongly related to avoidant attachment. That is, people who tended to push others away in their day-to-day lives were more likely than others to relate to fictional characters, and especially to characters who are also emotionally avoidant. Source: Parasocial Relationships Are Just Imaginary Friends for Adults | The Atlantic
I always enjoy reading L.M. Sacasas' thoughts on the intersection of technology, society, and ethics. This article is no different. In addition to the quotation from G.K. Chesterton which provides the title for this post, Sacasas also quotes Wendell Berry as saying, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines."
While I’ve chosen to highlight the part riffing off David Noble’s discussion of technology as religion, I’d highly recommend reading the last three paragraphs of Sacasas' article. In it, he talks about AI as being “the culmination of a longstanding trajectory… [towards] the eclipse of the human person”.
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The Enlightenment did not, as it turns out, vanquish Religion, driving it far from the pure realms of Science and Technology. In fact, to the degree that the radical Enlightenment’s assault on religious faith was successful, it empowered the religion of technology. To put this another way, the Enlightenment—and, yes, we are painting with broad strokes here—did not do away with the notions of Providence, Heaven, and Grace. Rather, the Enlightenment re-framed these as Progress, Utopia, and Technology respectively. If heaven had been understood as a transcendent goal achieved with the aid of divine grace within the context of the providentially ordered unfolding of human history, it became a Utopian vision, a heaven on earth, achieved by the ministrations Science and Technology within the context of Progress, an inexorable force driving history toward its Utopian consummation.
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In other words, we might frame the religion of technology not so much as a Christian heresy, but rather as (post-)Christian fan-fiction, an elaborate imagining of how the hopes articulated by the Christian faith will materialize as a consequence of human ingenuity in the absence of divine action. Source: Apocalyptic AI | The Convivial Society
Image: Midjourney (see alt text for prompt)
The right of politics seems to always find ways to describe in neutral or pejorative terms (e.g. “woke”) things that threaten the (racist, sexist, homophobic) status quo.
One of these tactics is to reframe human rights battles as ‘culture wars’, as Jen Sorensen so perfectly skewers in this cartoon.
After subscribing to ChatGPT even before version 4 came out, I subscribed to Midjourney recently. There’s a lot of concern around these things, and rightly so. But also, it’s exciting and (despite what some say) creative.
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The images were created one year apart, with the exact same text prompt: ‘Donald Trump and Barack Obama playing basketball’. And while the first image is a nightmarish blob of barely distinguishable flesh, the second is practically photo-realistic. Source: Mind-blowing image reveals how AI art has progressed in 1 year | Creative Bloq
I’m just bookmarking this for next time I’m involved in a website redesign. Purpose, positioning, proposition. Right, got it.
Why are we here? [PURPOSE]
How are we different? [POSITIONING]
Why should you care? [PROPOSITION]
If you can do this with authenticity and relevance, then you may just be onto something powerful – even kraken-like – for your brand. Source: Releasing the purpose kraken | ABA
We used to go to church regularly. Then, as the kids grew older and sporting fixtures took over the weekend, we started going sporadically. Then, after the pandemic, we stopped going altogether. It seems we weren’t alone, as attendance, which was already declining, has fallen sharply. In fact, around 25% of Anglican churches no longer hold weekly services.
So what are we to do with these buildings? There are two massive ones at the end of our road, and a third was converted into a house a couple of decades ago. Writing in The Guardian, Simon Jenkins suggests we need to reconnect the buildings with the communities which surround them.
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And of course, in longer-established neighborhoods, there will often already be a building or physical site that organically serves many of these functions – the neighborhood’s naturally-arising Schelling Point, or node of unconscious coordination. Whether church, mosque, synagogue, high-school gym or public library, it will be where people instinctively turn for shelter and aid in times of trouble. What I believe our troubled times now ask of us is that we be more conscious and purposive about creating loose networks of such places, each of them provisioned against the hour of maximum need. Source: The decline of churchgoing doesn’t have to mean the decline of churches – they can help us level up | The Guardian
Two books to add to my reading list, courtesy of this excellent review and analysis
Two books published this fall trouble the binary between sickness and health. Health Communism, by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, wholly refutes the possibility of being healthy under capitalism. The Future is Disabled, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, argues that to meet a future full of catastrophe, we need to think and act like disability activists. These books want to talk about sickness as a source of solidarity, and a way forward out of our current, very unwell state.
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Separating out the well and worthy workers from the sick and unproductive surplus class is one of capitalism’s more insidious divide-and-conquer tactics. We all know the person who brags about not taking one sick day in 20 years. But if capital separates the workers from the unwell, capitalists still manage to profit from both. The state, which could sustain the sickened surplus, instead neglects them, and the private health care sector steps in to profit. Adler-Bolton and Vierkant coin the term “extractive abandonment,” (a variation on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s description of the carceral system as “organized abandonment”) to describe how public subsidies flow to privatized facilities offering substandard care, from for-profit nursing homes to prisons. As a result, those in need of care are less likely to receive it where they could thrive, let alone exercise their self-determination. Instead, they are shunted into a “warehouse” of care, a “public-private partnership of pure immiseration.” Source: Is Anyone Ever Well? - Lux Magazine
Even if, like me, you turn all but the most important notifications off, it’s easy to get used to there being something new on your phone when you’re bored. Or waiting. Or feeling anxious.
If there isn’t something new there that’s immediately accessible, it becomes more boring. I haven’t had social media apps on my phone for years, but last week I logged out of several social networks in my mobile and desktop browsers.
You’ve got to replace these things with a habit, though. So I’ve now books next to the places I tend to sit and scroll. To be honest, even playing on my Steam Deck is a better use of my time than most scrolling I do on social networks.
Even though I get caught up like that all the time, the nihilism of that particular twenty minutes really got to me. It was such a nothing thing to do. I said aloud what I was thinking: “That… was a total loss.”
Basically I had just aged myself by twenty minutes. Two virtual cigarettes, and not even a fading buzz to show for it. I learned nothing, gained nothing, made no friends, impacted the world not at all, did not improve my mood or my capacity to do anything useful. It was marginally enjoyable on some reptile-brain level, sure, but its ultimate result was only to bring me nearer to death. Using my phone like that was pure loss of life — like smoking, except without the benefits.
I’m not trying to make a moral appeal, only a practical one. It doesn’t necessarily follow that frivolous phone use is bad or wrong. It’s unwise, and we already know that it’s unwise. But perhaps it is as unwise as smoking. Perhaps indulging the urge to browse Reddit after checking your email is just as reckless and self-destructive as lighting up a Marlboro 100 after breakfast, and will one day be seen with all the same revulsion and taboo.
Only you know how resonant this proposition is for you. If you lose ten, twenty, or thirty minutes to frivolous phone use on a multiple-times-daily basis (I sure do), it might make sense to regard it as belonging to a much higher stratum of concern than we tend to assume. Instead of grouping it with I-probably-shouldn’t-but-who-cares sorts of behaviors, like rewatching barely-worthwhile TV shows or kicking off your shoes without untying them, perhaps it belongs with possibly-catastrophic vices like daily deep-fried lunch, road raging, or smoking.
I didn’t know this guy, but for some reason clicked through to this post which appeared in my LinkedIn stream. It’s oddly affecting to see the words of someone who recently passed away doing so at peace with the world and hte place he had in it.
I loved a woman for 27 years, but that is private and not for you.
This has been my life: art, exploring, work and love. I’m proud of it and sad that it’s shortened. I haven’t seen Asia. Will the Canucks win the Stanley Cup in the next thirty years? Will people walk on Mars?
I have a Buddhist friend who legitimately believes that every person is doing their best all of the time. I’ve finally come around to this idea. I’ve lived the best life I could. Source: They Were All Splendid | DarrenBarefoot.com
I followed a link from this article to some OECD data which, as shown in the chart below, the UK has even lower welfare payments that the US. The economy of our country is absolutely broken, mainly due to Brexit, but also due to the chasm between everyday people and the elites.
There is also an unprecedented housing crisis, with young people increasingly excluded from home ownership if they cannot access family wealth. Public services are under unprecedented pressure, especially health care. Excess deaths have risen while Britain is the only country in Europe suffering from declining life expectancy. Source: Britain Is Much Worse Off Than It Understands | Foreign Policy
I’m a migraineur and there’s an overlap between that group of people and those who are synesthetes. But it turns out that my kids, who do not (yet?) suffer from migraines, also associate colour strongly with things that other people do not usually associate colour.
For example, days of the week. We’ve hard arguments over what colour ‘Monday’ is, for example. So this xkcd cartoon made me laugh.
Source: xkcd: Electron Color
Google is obviously a little freaked-out by tools such as ChatGPT and their potentially ability to destroy large sections of their search business. However, it seems like they didn’t do even the most cursory checks of the promotional material they put out as part of the hurried launch for ‘Bard’.
This, of course, is our future: ‘truthy’ systems leading individuals, groups, and civilizations down the wrong path. I’m not optimistic about our future.
Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate. Source: Google AI chatbot Bard offers inaccurate information in company ad | Reuters
I love this. Nintendo is increasing the salaries of its employees even though it intends to make less of a profit. Short of giving everyone ownership, this is how you invest in your people during a downturn.
Nintendo also amended its projected software and hardware sales. It projects that the Switch will sell 18 million units this year, as opposed to the prior forecast of 19 million. Similarly, it dropped the software sales forecast from 210 million units to 205 million. Nintendo re-affirmed that it does not currently have plan to raise prices for its consoles or games. Source: Nintendo Will Pay Its Workers 10% More ¬ GameSpot
In-person working can be energising. But perhaps not every day, for most people? There’s a reason that lots of people have decided to continue to work at home after the pandemic showed them that a different approach was possible.
I wouldn’t usually comment on celebrity culture, but I wanted to make three points here. First, are we sure that Ben Affleck isn’t depressed?
Second, why the continued assumption that being wealthy, famous, and good looking means you must be happy?
Third (and most importantly) even if you’re an actor, it doesn’t mean you’re good at dissimulation during down time. Some people just look bored when they’re bored. Like me.
Connor Oliver muses on the fact that, never mind the decline in ‘third places’ (or ‘third spaces’ as we’d probably call in them in the UK) there’s a decline in second places/spaces. What happens if you live and work in the same place all of the time?
It’s a real issue, and as he points out, it’s particularly acute if you’re single and don’t have kids. I’ve lived and worked from home since 2012, and from this particular house since 2014. So travel is particularly important to me, as are my kids sporting fixtures!
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My question is though, what does one do when they no longer even have a second place (work)?
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A not insignificant number of us have seen our first and second place merge into one and we’ve lost much of what made our second place a second place. In some more extreme examples like mine, people have never met their coworkers in person, or even know what some of their co-workers look like. Source: A third place? I’m not sure I even have a second anymore. | Muezza.ca
Curiously, I discovered this via Hacker News, which linked to an news article about it that I couldn’t access in the UK. I guess they hadn’t got their GDPR act together. So I’m sharing a link to the original journal article.
What’s interesting to me about this is that my heart hasn’t been the same since I had Covid this time last year. And sure enough, the research in this article shows that deaths from acute myocardial infarctions (i.e. heart attacks) have gone up by a third for my age group. Makes you think.
This is my commentary on Bryan Alexander’s commentary of an Op-Ed in The New York Times. You’d think I’d be wholeheartedly in favour of fewer jobs requiring a degree and, I am, broadly speaking.
However, and I suppose I should write a more lengthy piece on this somewhere, I am a little concerned about jobs becoming credential-free and experience-free experiences. Anecdotally, I’ve found that far from CVs and resumes being on the decline, they’re being used more than ever — along with rounds and rounds of interviews that seem to favour, well… bullshitters.
Which brings me to a final point. I’ve previously written about a huge change in how Americans think about higher ed. For a generation we thought that the more people get more college experience, the better. Since 2012 or so there have been signs of that national consensus breaking down. Now if the New York Times no longer shares that inherited model, is that shared view truly broken? Source: Employers, hire more people without college degrees, says the New York Times | Bryan Alexander
One of the reasons I continue with Thought Shrapnel is because it’s an easy way to ‘blog’ when I don’t feel like writing something from scratch.
This is a provocative interview with Alex Stamos, “the former head of security at Facebook who now heads up the Stanford Internet Observatory, which does deep dives into the ways people abuse the internet”. His argument is that social media companies (like Twitter) sometimes try to hard to make the world better, which he thinks should be “resisted”.
I’m not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I think we absolutely do need to be worried about misinformation. On the other, he does have a very good point about people being complicit in their own radicalisation. It’s complicated.
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The fundamental problem is that there’s a fundamental disagreement inside people’s heads — that people are inconsistent on what responsibility they believe information intermediaries should have for making society better. People generally believe that if something is against their side, that the platforms have a huge responsibility. And if something is on their side, [the platforms] should have no responsibility. It’s extremely rare to find people who are consistent in this.
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Any technological innovation, you’re going to have some kind of balancing act. The problem is, our political discussion of these things never takes those balances into effect. If you are super into privacy, then you have to also recognize that when you provide people private communication, that some subset of people will use that in ways that you disagree with, in ways that are illegal in ways, and sometimes in some cases that are extremely harmful. The reality is that we have to have these kinds of trade-offs. Source: Are we too worried about misinformation? | Vox
I thought the comments about how young people’s desire for instant gratification was nothing particularly new. However, it is worth thinking about the desire for more ‘green’ options being coupled with the desire to get everything instantly. The two are somewhat in tension.
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Youngsters’ appetite for instant gratification is also fuelling some distinctly ungreen consumer habits. The young have virtually invented quick commerce, observes Isabelle Allen of kpmg. And that convenience is affordable because it fails to price in all its externalities. The environmental benefits of eating plants rather than meat can be quickly undone if meals are delivered in small batches by a courier on a petrol-powered motorbike. Shein, a Chinese clothes retailer that is the fastest in fast fashion, tops surveys as a Gen Z favourite in the West, despite being criticised for waste; its fashionable garments are cheap enough to throw on once and then throw away. Like everyone else the young are, then, contradictory—because, like everyone else, they are only human. Source: How the young spend their money | The Economist
My kids like Fortnite and Warzone. The backstory to the genre, as told in this article is really interesting, along with the realisation that it fuses storytelling and competition.
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In the video-game medium, where players prize novelty—and, typically, not social commentary—the key to battle royale’s future may lie not in tweaking its rules but in deepening its story. In November, Activision released Warzone 2.0, which introduces some new mechanics. There’s now more than one safe circle, so players are herded into pockets of refuge, and it’s possible to interrogate downed opponents, making them reveal the position of their teammates. These embellishments add subtle points of difference, but it’s unlikely that they’ll energize the form. “Battle royale will now always be a part of the tool kit, in the same way that we’re never not going to have the fifty-two-card deck,” Lantz said. “But there’s not a lot of people making new games for the fifty-two-card deck. When a thirteen-year-old hears that there’s a new battle-royale game coming out today, it’s already a little bit boring. Like, you know, boomer stuff.” Source: How “Battle Royale” Took Over Video Games | The New Yorker
I think it’s fair to say that this article features ‘florid prose’ but the gist is that we should want society to be as complex as possible. This allow innovation to flourish and means we can solve some of the knottiest problems facing our world.
However, we’re hamstrung by issues around transnational governance, and particularly in the digital realm.
We don’t need a worldwide technical U.N. to figure this out. Rather, we need transnational topic-specific governance systems that interact with one another wherever they connect and overlap but that do not control one another, and that exercise subsidiarity to one another as well as to more local institutions. Yes, it will be a glorious mess — a Cambrian mess — but we will be collectively smarter for it. Source: The Internet Transition | Robin Berjon
I’m essentially just bookmarking this in case I think that I’ve misremembered the astounding difference in global wealth between the top 1% and bottom 90% mentioned in this article
An interesting and persuasive article from Lars Doucet who considers the ways in which AI spam might mean that people retreat from ‘open sea’ social networks (including gaming / dating ones) to more niche areas.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with interacting with AIs in ways that include emotion. But it’s a solipsistic existence, and perhaps not one that leads to human flourishing.
What happens when every online open lobby multiplayer game is choked with cheaters who all play at superhuman levels in increasingly undetectable ways?
What happens when, from the perspective of the average guy, “every girl” on every dating app is a fiction driven by an AI who strings him along (including sending original and persona-consistent pictures) until it’s time to scam money out of him?
What happens when comments sections on every forum gets filled with implausibly large consensus-building hordes who are able to adapt in real time and carefully slip their brigading just below the moderator’s rules?
I mean, to various degrees all this stuff is already happening. But what happens when it cranks up by an order of magnitude, seemingly overnight?
What happens when most “people” you interact with on the internet are fake?
I think people start logging off. Source: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off | Fortress of Doors
Adam Procter shared this with me recently, after witnessing the trials and tribulations of upgrading an iPod Classic. It’s pretty awesome, I have to say, but I don’t think I’m quite at the stage of custom PCBs quite yet…
This is a reply from John Udell, a very smart guy I’ve interacted with a few times over the years. He wisely doesn’t link to the post he’s critiquing, primarily because (ironically) it would give more attention to someone he’s suggesting has a problem weaning themselves off the attention economy.
Udell talks about the ‘sweet spot’ on Twitter having been between 200 and 15,000 followers. The most I had was around 14,500 which seemed pretty awesome for a few years. I did notice that number not going up much after 2014.
But, as he says, the point about saying things online if you’re a regular person is hanging out and discussing things. There are absolutely times when you want to shout about things and make a difference, but that’s what boosting/retweeting is for, right?
I thought this response by Becky Kane to Shopify publicly announcing that it’s cancelling 76,500 hours of meeting was not only a great example of identifying the issues underneath a problem, but also a masterclass in product marketing.
The Async Newsletter is from Twist, which positions itself as a collaborative messaging app for teams that doesn’t distract you. I’ve been meaning to try it for a while, and even more so now that I know how much they think about these things.
Kane’s point is that it’s easy to say ‘no meetings’ but this doesn’t provide another option for people. After all, if people are used to calling a meeting to share information, or because they’re not feeling ‘aligned’ as a team, or because they need to make a decision, how do they now do this?
Effective immediately, all recurring meetings with more than 2 people would be automatically removed from company calendars – canceling 76,500 hours of meetings per year in one fell swoop.
This hard-line anti-meeting policy — designed to give people back time for focused work – also included:
You may have noticed that Shopify “reupped” No Meeting Wednesdays. A friend of mine who worked there told me that it was an open secret that everyone scheduled meetings on Wednesdays anyway because it was the only time that wasn’t already taken up with meetings.
Without bigger, deeper changes to company culture and operations, there’s no reason to think the same meeting creep won’t simply happen again. Or worse, that communication will be pushed into even more fragmented, distracting, and ultimately unproductive forms.
I do like posts about people’s routines and, in fact, I contributed to a website which became a book of them! This particular one is by Warren Ellis, who seems to live quite a solitary existence, at least when he’s writing.
Being alone can bring an intensity to one’s work, I’ve found, which may or may not be relevant or welcome given on what you do for a living. Given Ellis is a writer of graphic novels, novellas, and screenplays, it’s absolutely fitting, I guess.
This is a great article by Katherine Boyle that talks about the lack of ‘seriousness’ in the USA, but also considers the wider geopolitical situation. We’re living at a time when world leaders are ever-older, and people between the ages of 18 and 29 just don’t have… that much to do with their time?
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In many ways, the emergence of extended adolescence was designed both to coddle the young and to conceal an obvious fact: that the usual leadership turnover across institutions is no longer happening. That the old are quite happy to continue delaying aging and the finality it brings, while the young dither away their prime years with convenient excuses and even better TikTok videos.
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So in 2023, here we are: in a tri-polar geopolitical order led by septuagenarians and octogenarians. Xi Jinping, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have little in common, but all three are entering their 70s and 80s, orchestrating the final acts of their political careers and frankly, their lives. That we are beholden to the decisions of leaders whose worldviews were shaped by the wars, famines, and innovations of a bygone world, pre-Internet and before widespread mass education, is in part why our political culture feels so stale. That the gerontocracy is a global phenomenon and not just an American quirk should concern us: younger generations who are native to technological strength, modern science and emerging cultural ailments are still sidelined and pursuing status markers they should have achieved a decade ago. Source: It’s Time to Get Serious | The Free Press
As this article points out, before 1979 removal of the traditional hijab was encouraged as part of Iran’s modernisation agenda. Once a theocracy came to power, however, the ‘morality police’ started using any means at their disposal to repress women.
Things have come to a head recently with high-profile women, for example athletes, removing the hijab. It would seem that the Iranian state is responding to this not with discussion, debate, or compassion, but rather with more repression -this time in the form of facial recognition and increasingly levels of surveillance.
We should be extremely concerned about this, as once there is no semblance of anonymity anywhere, then repression by bad actors (of which governments are some of the worst) will increase exponentially.
Two weeks later, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Jina Mahsa Amini died after being taken into custody by Iran’s morality police for not wearing a hijab tightly enough. Her death sparked historic protests against women’s dress rules, resulting in an estimated 19,000 arrests and more than 500 deaths. Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven’t been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”
Although there are other ways women could have been identified, Shajarizadeh and others fear that the pattern indicates face recognition is already in use—perhaps the first known instance of a government using face recognition to impose dress law on women based on religious belief. Source: Iran to use facial recognition to identify women without hijabs | Ars Technica
Well, this is fun! More whimsy at work, please.
The photoshopped felines are part of an effort by the Portland, Ore., branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to portray their work in an entertaining light.
Engineering isn’t always exciting, so the district tries to have a fun social media presence, public affairs specialist Chris Gaylord told NBC’s Today.com on Monday.
“I will use levity whenever I can; that’s what people enjoy,” Gaylord said. “That’s not us dumbing things down. That’s us respecting and not taking for granted the attention of our publics.” Source: Yes, a branch of the Army Corps of Engineers did make a cat calendar | Stars and Stripes
This, via Warren Ellis, is a useful resource. I also like that its creator, Jane Friedman, has made it available to be downloaded, printed, and shared “no permission required” (although I wish she’d explicitly used a CC0 license)
When I shared this with a friend, they pointed out that it doesn’t include the ‘kickstarter’ kind of model. While Friedman points out that the chart is primarily for ‘trade press’ (i.e. books with a general audience) there’s a whole different type of approach, which I kind of pioneered a decade ago with OpenBeta and which is more easily achieved these days with platforms such as Leanpub.
(click on image to download PDF)
This is an increasingly complicated question to answer because:
I’ve seen all of the Star Wars films at least once. I’m not big into sci-fi or fantasy, but on the recommendation of seemingly everyone (including my son) I’ve started watching Andor on Disney+.
I’m not even half-way through but it really is excellent, with no ridiculously CGI, just a believable world and an excellent storyline.
Despite its high quality, Andor‘s ratings have lagged behind Star Wars shows like Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Mandalorian. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley hopes that Andor will attract a larger audience in season 2. “It’s so good,” he says. “It deserves higher ratings than it’s gotten so far. And I definitely want to see more shows like this. This is the kind of show—especially the kind of Star Wars show—that I’ve been pining after for all these years. So please let’s all just give it as much support as we can.” Source: ‘Andor’ Is a Master Class in Good Writing | WIRED
I think this is good advice. I try to update mine regularly, although I did realise that last year I chose a photo that was five years old! I prefer ‘natural’ photos that are taken in family situations which I then edit, rather than headshots these days.
[…]
And how often should you update your photos, so they don’t give someone pause when you meet in person? “Profile pictures should be updated every three years unless there is a significant change in appearance. Then, they should be taken sooner.” So, the next time you scroll LinkedIn, log in to a Zoom meeting, or even send an email with a thumbnail profile photo, think about how you want to be perceived, and don’t hesitate to use a picture that fully represents who you are. Source: How Often Should You Update Your Profile Photos? | WIRED
I’m delighted to hear about this and I hope the vote passes. It’s a farce that place of privilege should gain tax breaks and have ‘charitable status’. As I’ve said many times before, opting out of state education and the NHS should be, either impossible or ridiculously expensive.
The motion submitted by Keir Starmer’s party for the opposition day debate on Wednesday is drafted to push the charitable status scheme that many private schools enjoy to be investigated, as the party attempts to shift the political focus on to education.
[…]
Labour will hope the motion will force the government to make its MPs vote down an issue, rather than ignoring the process. A Labour source has previously said: “Conservative MPs voting against our motion are voting against higher standards in state schools for the majority of children in our country.” Source: Labour look to force vote on ending private schools’ tax breaks | The Guardian
Most of the things at the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas every year are either pointless (at least to me) or in some way enabling of ever-greater surveillance.
However, this e-ink car really caught my imagination. I’m a big fan of both e-ink (it’s easy on the eyes) and customisation, so this is really in my sweet spot. I did wonder for half a second about a whole movie plot using e-ink for a getaway car, and then I realised that every car these days has a GPS chip and SIM card in it…
Discovered via Kottke, this ‘seven levels of busy’ makes me realise that I don’t really want to be beyond Level 3 most weeks. Level 4 is OK on occasion.
It’s over a decade since I’ve experienced Levels 5 and 6, I reckon. And I’ve never let things get to Level 7.
Photo: Dan Freeman
The artist Nick Cave has a (newsletter? blog?) called The Red Hand Files in which he answers questions from his fans. Somebody pointed me towards a recent post where he talks about his aim to write and record a new album in 2023.
I love the way he talks about the creative process, and how mysterious it is.
[…]
Writing lyrics is the pits. It’s like jumping for frogs, Fred. It’s the shits. It’s the bogs. It actually hurts. It comes in spurts, but few and far between. There is something obscene about the whole affair. Like crimes that rhyme. I hope this doesn’t last long. I’m actually scared. But it always does. Last long. To write a song. You hope to God there is something left. You are bereft. I’m going to stop this letter. It isn’t making things better. It’s like flogging a dead horse. Worse. It’s a hearse. A hearse of dead verse. Dead, Fred. Dead. Source: Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #217
I didn’t get a chance to read this excellent article in The New Yorker about Lionel Messi until today. It was published the week leading up to the World Cup Final, which of course Argentina won, making Messi possibly the greatest player of all time (behind Pele? RIP.)
What I like about it is that it shows that ‘work’ doesn’t always look like running around the place looking ‘busy’. In fact, the greatest people at a given thing are usually involved in the background while people are concentrating solely on the foreground.
[…]
[I]f you happen to be watching a match featuring Leo Messi, you’ll notice that something on the order of eighty-five per cent of the time, he can be found off the ball, strolling and dawdling and looking mildly uninterested. It is the kind of behavior associated with selfish players, prima donnas who expend no effort on defense and bestir themselves only when goal-scoring opportunities arise. Messi, of course, is one of the most prolific scorers of all time, with a career total of nearly eight hundred goals in club and international competition. His penchant for walking is not a symptom of indolence or entitlement; it’s a practice that reveals supreme footballing intelligence and a commitment to the efficient expenditure of energy. Also, it’s a ruse—the greatest con job in the history of the game.
A famous aphorism, usually attributed to the Spanish manager Vicente del Bosque, sums up the subtly visionary play of the midfielder Sergio Busquets this way: when you watch the game, you don’t see Busquets—but when you watch Busquets, you see the whole game. Something related might be said about the great Argentinean: when you watch Messi, you watch him watching the game. Another manager, Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola, who coached Messi for four years at Barcelona, has described his walking, especially in the early stages of a game, as form of cartography—an exercise in scanning and surveying, taking the measure of the defense, noticing where the vulnerabilities lie, and calculating when and how opportunities might be seized. “After five, ten minutes, he’ll have a map in his eyes and in his brain,” Guardiola has said. “[He’ll] know exactly what is the space and what is the panorama.” Source: The Genius of Lionel Messi Just Walking Around | The New Yorker
I love the idea behind this list of 52 acts of kindness. Realistically, number 14, 16, and 38 are the ones I’m likely to do (because I already do them!)
16. Make a mixtape Give someone a curated Spotify or YouTube playlist of stuff you think they would like.
38. Drive kindly If you’re sure it’s safe, flash your lights or wave your hand at someone waiting to cross the road in front of you. Source: 52 acts of kindness: how to spread joy in every week of 2023 | The Guardian
I used to have a quotation on the wall of my classroom when I was a teacher that has been attributed to various different people, but reads: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
The point of the quotation is that to have any kind of success in life that isn’t luck-dependent, you have to be ready. That looks different depending on the situation, but (for me at least) involves thinking about different scenarios, what could play out, etc.
This post, found via HN, is from a developer thinking about software projects. But the point he makes is universal: preparing effectively means that you can get on and focus on delivering without having to keep stopping.
But motivation is nothing more than that. It helps us start, but it doesn’t mean we’ll finish, or even produce half of what we want to. Even when we are motivated, if we don’t make enough progress our motivation has a way of epically [sic] disappearing.
[…]
Knowing how to make progress and making progress are two different things, but we often conflate them and treat them as the same thing. We basically jump into the task and start.
[…]
Productivity doesn’t come from feeling motivated, it comes from knowing what you need to do in enough detail that you can complete it without continually stopping and losing your focus. Source: To Be Productive, Be Prepared | Martin Rue
Image: Brett Jordan
OK, so it’s not Vibranium, but discovering potentially three new minerals in a meteorite found in Somalia is pretty exciting! I wonder what new substances we’ll find as we further explore space, and what uses we’ll discover for them?
[…]
Dr Chris Herd, a professor in the department of earth and atmospheric sciences and the curator of the collection, said that while he was classifying the rock he noticed “unusual” minerals. Herd asked Andrew Locock, the head of the university’s electron microprobe laboratory, to investigate.
[…]
Coupled with the pandemic and the energy crisis, Brexit is absolutely destroying the UK at the moment. If you haven’t watched The Brexit Effect made by the Financial Times, then you really, really should.
This article in the New Statesman argues that the deregulation touted as a huge benefit of Brexit isn’t wanted or needed by most UK businesses. It’s the red tape added by being outside the EU single market that’s the problem.
[…]
In a new survey of 938 businesses, made up largely of SMEs (and therefore representative of the UK economy), just 14 per cent specified an EU regulation they would remove; 58 per cent of firms had no preference over the amendment or removal of any EU regulation. Half said that deregulation is either a low priority or not a priority at all. Source: Exclusive: Most UK businesses see no benefit in post-Brexit deregulation | New Statesman
Where we live is unusual for the UK: we have first, middle, and high schools. The knock-on effect of this in the 21st century is that kids aged nine years old are walking to school and, often, taking a smartphone with them.
This study shows that the average age children were given a phone by parents was 11.6 years old, which meshes with the ‘norm’ (I would argue) in the UK of giving kids one when they go to secondary school.
What I like about these findings are that parents overall seem to do a pretty good job. It’s been a constant battle with our eldest, who is almost 16, to be honest, but I think he’s developed some useful habits around technology.
[…]
The research team followed a group of low-income Latino children in Northern California as part of a larger project aimed to prevent childhood obesity. Little prior research has focused on technology acquisition in non-white or low-income populations, the researchers said.
The average age at which children received their first phones was 11.6 years old, with phone acquisition climbing steeply between 10.7 and 12.5 years of age, a period during which half of the children acquired their first phones. According to the researchers, the results may suggest that each family timed the decision to what they thought was best for their child.
“One possible explanation for these results is that parents are doing a good job matching their decisions to give their kids phones to their child’s and family’s needs,” Robinson said. “These results should be seen as empowering parents to do what they think is right for their family.” Source: Age that kids acquire mobile phones not linked to well-being, says Stanford Medicine study | Stanford Medicine
‘Pathetic Dot’ is not a great name for a theory, and the diagram on the Wikipedia page isn’t the best, but Christina Bowen reminded me of it during an introductory conversation yesterday.
I can’t find it again quickly, but this also reminds me of a discussion I saw about how credit scores can exert almost as much unseen social control over people in the West as very visible social control mechanisms in more authoritarian countries.
Lessig identifies four forces that constrain our actions: the law, social norms, the market, and architecture. The law threatens sanction if it is not obeyed. Social norms are enforced by the community. Markets through supply and demand set a price on various items or behaviors. The final force is the (social) architecture. By that Lessig means “features of the world, whether made, or found”; noting that facts like biology, geography, technology and others constrain our actions. Together, those four forces are the totality of what constrains our action, in fashion both direct and indirect, ex post and ex ante.
[…]
The theory can be applied to many aspects of life (such as how smoking is regulated), but it has been popularized by Lessig’s subsequent usage of it in the context of the regulation of the Internet. Source: Pathetic dot theory | Wikipedia
It’s always interesting reading articles from foreign newspapers about the state of the UK. I wish it were true that conversations about Brexit and the damage it’s done were on the table. But I just don’t see it.
[…]
I definitely feel the middle-aged white guy urge to focus on health, nutrition, etc. But I just felt really sorry when I watched the start of a video where Bryan Johnson, who sold his company to PayPal, goes through his routine. He just looks… lonely?
Photo below is of Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, who also follows an ascetic lifestyle.
About a decade ago, it was possible to visualise your LinkedIn network. I really liked it, especially as I had three distinct groups of connections (EdTech, schools, and Higher Ed).
This website allows you to visualise around 4.5k Fediverse instances, as of last week. You can change the colour and size of the dots depending on number of users, posts, theme, etc.
Exercise.cafe isn’t on there, nor is wao.wtf. But it’s still a useful tool.
Source: Mapstodon
I’m essentially bookmarking this publicly as it’s a useful reference for Fediverse instances (all currently running Mastodon!) which are collectively owned.
What I’m interested in is diversifying and going beyond this very useful list. First, I’d love examples to be added which are running other Fediverse software than Mastodon. For example, I’ve got a test instance of Misskey running at wao.wtf.
Second, I’m interested in the governance of these instances. If you’re not involved with co-operatives or other organisations that are democratically operated, it can seem like a bit of a black box. So I think we need a collaboratively-created guide to collective decision-making processes when it comes to Fediverse instances.
This page will list also instances which are closed for registrations and dead instances, so that we can collectively learn from their experience.
Originally created by @nemobis@mamot.fr inspired by a @Matt_Noyes@social.coop thread. Source: Collectively owned instances - fediparty | Codeberg.org
This is 100% true and one of the reasons that I think that Open Badges and Verifiable Credentials are so awesome. Associational value is built-in for human beings, as we’re social creatures who set store by what other people value.
For example, I’m Dr. Belshaw which has a certain cachet and status in some circles. But people are usually much more interested/impressed by the fact that I worked for Mozilla and that one of our co-op’s clients is Greenpeace.
Them’s the breaks. And I feel like passing on this kind of wisdom to the younger generations is really important, to be honest, as a way that the world actually works.
There are two main avenues you could imagine for this advantage. One is basically nepotism: through the organisation you meet lots of other people who will later give you preferential access to jobs.
A second avenue is throughthe associtional value of the institution: that people with no specific connection to you or that organisation will see the name of Prestigious Institution on your resume and hire you because, well, you were at Prestigious Institution.
[…]
I think associational value often comes out of single-sentence descriptions of what somebody has done, and that therefore there are often relatively-easy ways to get 99% of the associational benefits of a prestigious institution at a much lower cost.
For example, in the magazine-writing world, people are often (approximately) defined by 1-3 of the most famous publications they’ve ever written for: “X’s work has appeared in TK, TK and TK,” or “this is my friend Y, she writes for [famous media brand].”
[…]
I’m not entirely sure how to work around this one, beyond the “try to get a mild affiliation with a prestigious institution, even if it’s an incredibly silly one” hack. Source: Associational Value | Atoms vs Bits
Richard Hammond, co-presenter of the original Top Gear and The Grand Tour reflects on his near-death experience. Worth a watch.
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
Source: Richard Hammond explains what he experienced during his coma | 310mph Crash | YouTube
There are some excellent suggestions in this list of 53 things that can give you a lift over the winter months. I’ve highlighted three of my favourites below!
[…]
18. Buy foods you can’t identify Purchase food in shops where the majority of products have no English on the packaging, so eating what you buy is an adventure. It might be black limes, a box of tamarinds or a rosewater drink with vermicelli pieces. It’s like travelling without travelling.
[…]
50. Sweat in a sauna We’ve all been told about the wellbeing boost of plunging into cold water, wild swimming and turning your shower down to freezing. But who wants to be cold? Book yourself into a sauna. Let the heat and steam soak deep into your bones and sweat out all your worries. Source: Need a lift? Here’s 53 easy ways to add cheer to your life as winter looms | The Guardian
Adam Greenfield composed a thread this morning on Mastodon in which he referenced Ivan Illich’s call for conviviality. This was also referenced in a post by Audrey Watters which was shared a few minutes later in my timeline by Aaron Davis.
Such synchronicity is, of course, entirely random but meshed well with my state of mind this morning. I find it interesting that Audrey thinks it’s ridiculous to think that Mastodon is “what’s next” and instead looks to email. For what it’s worth, I see the Fediverse as being a lot like email, actually.
Given that she’s got a brain and experience several times the size of mine, I’d love it if she wrote more about this…
Sometimes ‘Ask HN’ threads on Hacker News are inane or full of people just wanting to show off their technical knowledge. Occasionally, though, there’s a thread that’s just fascinating, such as this one about what might happen once artificial intelligence is widespread.
Other than the usual ones about deepfakes, porn, and advertising (all which should concern us) I thought this comment by user ‘htlion’ was insightful:
We live near the middle of town, a five minute walk to the leisure centre — and less than that to get to the shops. As a result, we don’t use our cars at all for three days of the week, and I go to the gym at the leisure centre every day.
My grandmother, who wasn’t well-off and who rented all her life, used to ensure that she lived right next to a bus stop. Although she wouldn’t have used the phrase from this article, she knew that she was more likely to travel and get places that way!
[…]
But what about when something is farther off in space rather than time?
Say a 1-hour activity is 10 minutes away, compared to 5 minutes away. The total time usage would be 80 vs 70 minutes, about 15% longer. A linear model would predict that it would feel 15% more costly, and then proportionally affect your likelihood of going. In practice though, an extra 10 or 20 minutes of travel time will somehow frequently nudge you into non-participation. Source: Hyperbolic Distance Discounting | Atoms vs Bits
Apparently this comb has an inscription on it which reads “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” It was made from an imported elephant tusk!
The authors also used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, and digital microscopy to confirm that the comb is made of ivory from an elephant tusk, suggesting it was imported. The team sent a sample from the comb to the University of Oxford’s radiometric laboratory, but the carbon was too poorly preserved to accurately date the sample.
The inscription consists of 17 letters (two damaged) that together form a complete seven-word sentence. The letters aren’t well-aligned, per the authors, nor are they uniform in size; the letters become progressively smaller and lower in the first row, with letters running from right to left. When whoever engraved the comb reached the edge, they turned it 180 degrees and engraved the second row from left to right. The engraver actually ran out of room on the second row, so the final letter is engraved just below the last letter in that row. Still, said engraver had to be fairly skilled, given the small size of the lettering. Source: Ancient wisdom: Oldest full sentence in first alphabet is about head lice | Ars Technica
Terence Eden reflects on changing jobs when working from home and how… weird it can be. While I’ve been based from two different converted garages during the past decade, I’ve travelled a lot so it has felt different.
I can imagine, though, if that’s not the case, it can all feel a little bit discombobulating!
The following Monday I opened the door to the same office. I logged in to the same laptop. I logged into a new Slack - which wasn’t remarkably different from the old one. Signed in to a new Trello workspace - ditto. And started a video call with my new team.
I’ll admit, It didn’t feel like a new job!
There was no confusing commute to a new office. No having to work out where the toilets and fire exits were. No “here’s your desk - it’s where John used to sit, so people might call you John for a bit”. I didn’t even have to remember people’s names because Zoom showed all my colleagues' names & job titles.
There was no waiting in a liminal space while receptionists worked out how to let me in the building.
In short, there was no meaningful transition for me. Source: Job leaving rituals in the WFH era | Terence Eden’s Blog
Aral Balkan, who has 22,000 followers on the Fediverse and who recently had a birthday, has written about the influx of people from Twitter. As I’ve found, especially on my personal blog, you can essentially run a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on yourself by posting a link to your blog to the Fediverse. As each server pings it, the server can eventually buckle under the weight.
What follows is a really useful post in terms of Aral’s journey towards what he calls the ‘Small Web’. While I don’t necessarily agree that we should all have our own instances, I do think it’s useful for organisations of every size to run them.
Thank goodness Elon isn’t that smart.
I jest, of course… Eugen would likely ban his account the moment he saw it. But it does illustrate a problem: Elon’s easy to ban. Stephen, not so much. He’s a national treasure for goodness’ sake. One does not simply ban Stephen Fry.
And yet Stephen can similarly (yet unwittingly) cause untold expense to the folks running Mastodon instances just by joining one.
The solution, for Stephen at least, is simple: he should run his own personal instance.
(Or get someone else to run it for him, like I do.)
Running his own instance would also give Stephen one additional benefit: he’d automatically get verified.
After all, if you’re talking to, say, @stephen@social.stephenfry.com, you can be sure it’s really him because you know he owns the domain.
Source: Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”) | Aral Balkan
It’s great to see that Raspberry Pi Ltd. and other organisations are setting up their own servers. Not only does it enable them to verify themselves, but that of their employees and affiliates really easily.
I’m sure it won’t all be smooth sailing ahead for the Fediverse, especially when it comes to trust and verification. But I’m optimistic that the recent migration from Twitter is ultimately for the good of the human species.
Distributed systems are an interesting corner case when it comes to trust. Because when it comes to identity, you eventually have to trust someone. Whether that’s a corporation, like Twitter, or a government, or the person themselves. Trust is needed.
With Mastodon the root of trust for identity is the admin of the instance you’re on, and the admins on all the other instances, where you’re trusting them to remove “fake” accounts. Or, if you’re running your own instance, then it’s the domain name registrars. The details of our domain registration of the raspberrypi.social domain may be redacted for privacy, but our domain registrar knows who we are, and is the same registrar we use for all our other domains. They trust our government-issued identity to prove that we are Raspberry Pi Ltd. You can trust them, they trust the government, and ultimately the government trusts us because they can use Ultima Ratio Regum, the last argument of kings. Source: An escape pod was jettisoned during the fighting | Raspberry Pi
A “technical presentation that is structured and designed for a non-technical audience” by Stephen Downes. With the Twitter lifeboats again being deployed, this is a timely look at how federated and decentralised technologies can be used for removing the silos from online learning.
As a new generation of digital technologies evolves we are awash in new terms and concepts: the metaverse, the fediverse, blockchain, web3, acitivitypub, and more. This presentation untangles these concepts and presents them from the perspective of their impact on open learning.
I spend a lot of time on the side of football pitches and basketball courts watching my kids playing sports. As a result, I talk to parents and grandparents from all walks of life, who are interested in me being a co-founder of a co-op — and that, on average, I work five-hour days.
This wasn’t always the case, of course. I’ve been lucky, for sure, but also intentional about the working life I want to create. And I’m here to tell you that unless you at least partly own the business you work for, you’re going to be overworking until the end of your days.
There are myriad ways a person’s day job can slip into their non-working hours: think a worker chatting to someone from their industry at their child’s birthday party, and suddenly slipping into networking mode. Or perhaps an employee hears their boss mention a book in a meeting, so they download and listen to it on evening walks for a week, stopping occasionally to jot down some notes.
[…]
However, for many, this overwork no longer feels like a choice – and that’s when things go bad. This can especially be the case, says [Alexia] Cambon [director of research at workplace-consultancy Gartner’s HR practice], when these off-hours tasks become another form of presenteeism – for instance, an employee reading a competitor’s website and sharing links in a messaging channel at night, just so they can signal to their boss they’re always on. “We’re seeing… more employees who feel monitored by their organisations, and then feel like they have to put in extra hours,” she says.
As such, this hidden overwork can do a lot of potential damage if it becomes an unspoken requirement. “If there’s more expectation and burden associated with it, that’s where people are going to have negative consequences,” says Nancy Rothbard, management professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, US. “That’s where it becomes tough on them.” Source: The hidden overwork that creeps into so many jobs | BBC Worklife
I’m reading This Could Be Our Future by (Kickstarter co-founder) Yancey Strickler at the moment. It rails against hyperfinancialisation and then provides a way of thinking about the world differently.
As this opinion piece in The Guardian points out, we need a way of thinking about politics and the market which isn’t driven (literally!) by investment bankers.
[…]
Looking at the coalition government, every senior figure who managed Treasury economic policy – George Osborne, Danny Alexander, David Cameron, Rupert Harrison, John Kingman and Nick Macpherson – later gained well-paid positions in the financial sector. And three of the last five chancellors have come from the sector. Jeremy Hunt’s current advisers all come from investment banking.
This matters because investment bankers have very little to do with the real economy that ordinary people inhabit. They don’t run businesses. They don’t deal with actual product and customer markets. Their work is confined to financial markets, aiding corporate financial manoeuvres, and trading and managing their own financial assets. Their primary aim is to make profits from such activities, regardless of how it affects the real economy, the national interest or employees. If that means shorting the pound or breaking up a successful company for quick profits, then so be it.
[…]
And an overpowered financial sector has certainly not been conducive to good governance, either. There’s nothing democratic about extensive public service cuts being used to pay for saving the private banking sector, as in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, or the bond markets determining the credibility of governments, or the fact that the bankers and hedge funds are the biggest single source of Conservative party donations. Nor is trust in British democracy likely to be enhanced by a super-rich PM who has allegedly avoided taxes and made a fortune as a financier at the nation’s cost. Source: With Rishi Sunak, the City’s takeover of British politics is complete | Aeron Davis
I’m quoting this liberally, as it’s excellent. I was on Twitter from almost when it began in January 2007 through to late 2021 and the journey from protest tool to toy of plutocrats has been brutal.
To put this in vulgar dialectical terms:
[…]
[I]nnovative models do not necessarily emerge from the commercial entrepreneurism of the Great Men of history and economics. More often, they emerge in the course of collective efforts to solve one of the problems created by the capitalist order. Resistance is the motor of history. Afterwards, opportunists like Musk use the outsize economic leverage that a profit-driven market grants them to buy up new technologies and turn them definitively against the movements and milieux that originally produced them.
[…]
Musk claims that his goal is to open up the platform for a wider range of speech. In practice, there is no such thing as “free speech” in its pure form—every decision that can shape the conditions of dialogue inevitably has implications regarding who can participate, who can be heard, and what can be said. For all we might say against them, the previous content moderators of Twitter did not prevent the platform from serving grassroots movements. We have yet to see whether Musk will intentionally target activists and organizers or simply permit reactionaries to do so on a crowdsourced basis, but it would be extremely naïve to take him at his word that his goal is to make Twitter more open.
[…]
Effectively, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter returns us to the 1980s, when the chief communications media were entirely controlled by big corporations. The difference is that today’s technologies are participatory rather than unidirectional: rather than simply seeing newscasters and celebrities, users see representations of each other, carefully curated by those who run the platforms. If anything, this makes the pretensions of social media to represent the wishes of society as a whole more insidiously persuasive than the spectacles of network television could ever be.
[…]
It’s you against the billionaires. At their disposal, they have all the wealth and power of the most formidable empire in the history of the solar system. All you have going for you is your own ingenuity, the solidarity of your comrades, and the desperation of millions like you. The billionaires succeed by concentrating power in their own hands at everyone else’s expense. For you to succeed, you must demonstrate ways that everyone can become more powerful. Two principles confront each other in this contest: on one side, individual aggrandizement at the expense of all living things; on the other, the potential of the individual to increase the self-determination of all human beings, all living creatures. Source: The Billionaire and the Anarchists: Tracing Twitter from Its Roots as a Protest Tool to Elon Musk’s Acquisition | CrimethInc
I didn’t forsee Elon Musk buying Twitter when I deactivated my verified account about a year ago. But it was already an algorithmic hellscape.
As this article points out, Big Tech no longer really does very interesting stuff technically. It’s all about the politics these days.
[…]
[Y]ou can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
[…]
The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that. Source: Welcome to hell, Elon | The Verge
Image: DALL-E 2
It’s hard not to agree with this. Things may play out a little different in the EU, but in the USA and UK I can foresee the middle classes despairing.
Otherwise, they will be left to rely on an overly bureaucratic and entrenched middle management layer to do so and that solution is likely to come from outsourcing or consultants. All the while, the retail environment deteriorates as workers are tasked to replace themselves without any additional benefits; service declines, implementation falters, costs go up, more consulting required.
Union formation across the retail landscape will force corporations to reduce management head count and implement AI management solutions which focus on labor relations. The once fungible and disposable retail worker will be transformed into a highly sought after professional who will be relied upon specifically for automation implementation. Source: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers | Chatterhead Says
Image: DeepMind
I’ll not name the employer, and this wasn’t recent, but I’ve been ‘quietly fired’ from a job before. I never really knew why, other than a conflict of personalities, but there was no particular need for pursuing that path (instead of having a grown-up conversation) and it definitely had an impact on my mental health.
I think part of the reason this happens is because a lot of organisations have extremely poor HR functions and managers without much training. As a result, they muddle through, avoiding conflict, and causing more problems as a result.
In overt cases, this is known as ‘constructive dismissal’: when an employee is forced to leave because the employer created a hostile work environment. The more subtle phenomenon of nudging employees slowly but surely out of the door has recently been dubbed ‘quiet firing’ (the apparent flipside to ‘quiet quitting’, where employees do their job, but no more). Rather than lay off workers, employers choose to be indirect and avoid conflict. But in doing so, they often unintentionally create even greater harm.
[…]
An employee subtly nudged out the door isn’t without legal recourse, either. “If you were to look at each individual aspect of quiet firing, there’s likely nothing serious enough to prove an employer breach of contract,” says Horne. “However, there’s the last-straw doctrine: one final act by the employer which, when added together with past behaviours, can be asserted as constructive dismissal by the employee.”
More immediate though, is the mental-health cost to the worker deemed to be expendable by the employer – but who is never directly informed. “The psychological toll of quiet firing creates a sense of rejection and of being an outcast from their work group. That can have a huge negative impact on a person’s wellbeing,” says Kayes. Source: The bosses who silently nudge out workers | BBC Worklife
This is written in typical bombastic Jacobin style, and I’ve yet to read Vitalik Buterin’s book, but I have to say I can’t disagree with the conclusion: there is no leftist case for crypto.
Perhaps there was in the beginning? But now it’s easy to see where it’s headed. And it’s not in any way a socialist enterprise.
[…]
[…]
If you’re digging a hole or otherwise doing manual work, it’s obvious when you’re working and when you’re not. The same is true, to a great extent, when teaching (my former occupation).
Doing what I do now, which is broadly under the banner of ‘knowledge work’, it can be difficult for others to see the difference between when I’m working and when I’m not. This is one of the reasons that working from home is so liberating.
[…]
I recently had a conversation with a long-time colleague, someone I know and respect. I found it interesting that even he, who has worked in software since the 90’s, still felt odd when he wasn’t at his computer “working”. After decades of experience, he knew and understood that the most meaningful conceptual progress he made on problems was always away from his computer: on a run, in the shower, laying in bed at night. That’s where the insight came. And yet, even after all these years, he still felt a strange obligation to be at his computer because that’s too often our the metal image of “working”.
Image: Charles Deluvio
It’s almost a year now that I finally deactivated my Twitter account with no intention of going back to it. Like Ben Werdmuller in this article, I had a yearly ‘detox’ from the service. Coming back from it became harder and harder.
Twitter from 2007 to about 2011 (coincidentally the birth years of my children!) was amazing. It was definitely helpful in terms of my career, and I’m still in touch with people who I got to know via Twitter from that period.
But I don’t need it any more. I use various Fediverse accounts and LinkedIn to keep in touch with people personally and professionally. I also don’t share as much of my life as I used to online, partly because the world has changed and partly because therapy showed me it was all part of the mask I’m wearing.
So yes, let’s pour one out for Twitter, which if Musk’s acquisition goes ahead, is going to be a empty husk of what it was formerly. Life moves on.
[…]
As big tech silos diminish in stature, the all-in-one town squares we’ve enjoyed on the internet are going to start to fade from view. In some ways, it’s akin to the decline of the broadcast television networks: whereas there used to be a handful of channels that entire nations tuned into together, we now enjoy content that’s fragmented over hundreds. The same will be true of our community hangouts and conversations. In the same way that broadcast television didn’t really capture the needs of the breadth of its audience but instead enjoyed its popularity because that’s what was there at the time, we’ll find that fragmented communities better fit the needs of the breadth of diverse society. It’s a natural evolution.
It’s also one that demands better community platforms. We’re still torn between 1994-era websites, 1996-era Internet forums, and 2002-era social networks, with some video sharing platforms in-between. We could use more innovation in this space: better spaces for different kinds of conversations (and particularly asynchronous ones), better applications of distributed identities, better ways to follow conversations across all the places we’re having them. This is a time for new ideas and experimentation. Source: The end of Twitter | werd.io
Image: Nathan Dumlao
Sure, it’s an advert for beer, but it’s also a brilliant example of how you can bring people together IRL to get to know one another despite seemingly-intractable differences.
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
Source: This New Heineken Ad is Briliant #OpenYourWorld | YouTube
Jon Dron makes a good point here that we need to put the humanity back into education, otherwise we’re going to have AI everywhere and a completely broken system.
I thought it would be fun, in an ironic kind of way, to use an AI art generator to illustrate this post…
[…]
This is a wake-up call. Soon, if not already, most of the training data for the AIs will be generated by AIs. Unchecked, the result is going to be a set of ever-worse copies of copies, that become what the next generation consumes and learns from, in a vicious spiral that leaves us at best stagnant, at worst something akin to the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s Time Machine. If we don’t want this to happen then it is time for educators to reclaim, to celebrate, and (perhaps a little) to reinvent our humanity. We need, more and more, to think of education as a process of learning to be, not of learning to do, except insofar as the doing contributes to our being. It’s about people, learning to be people, in the presence of and through interaction with other people. It’s about creativity, compassion, and meaning, not the achievement of outcomes a machine could replicate with ease. I think it should always have been this way. Source: So, this is a thing… | Jon Dron
Image: DALL-E 2 (“robot painting a picture of a robot painting a picture of a robot, in the style of Rene Magritte”)
Happy as I am with my Garmin Venu 2s, if I didn’t need to also buy an iPhone to use one, I probably already would have bought an Apple Watch Ultra. Despite my skinny wrists, my recent health scare means that the cellular capability and ECG combined with a more-than-24-hour battery life would seal the deal.
So I was interested in this review by someone who took the Ultra up into the Scottish Highlands. It turns out he loved it.
The standard Apple Watches are incredibly capable devices, that I’ve used to great utility on countless hiking trips, but using them in that context always felt a bit like I was pushing the boundary of what it was intended for or capable of. Whereas the Ultra is very much designed for the backcountry context. It is more rugged, more long lasting and much easier to read…all while still being 100% an Apple Watch and not compromising any of the features that make a standard Apple Watch so useful. Source: Testing an Apple Watch Ultra in the Scottish Highlands | David Smith
A typically thought-provoking piece by L. M. Sacasas which, ironically, I’ve got plenty of time to read, process, and react to after getting up ridiculously early this morning!
It’s interesting to read this from a UK context, after an enforced mourning period after the death of the Queen. This piece definitely speaks into that context, about the “range of legible emotions” being “constricted”. After all, you weren’t even allowed to hold up a blank sheet of paper in public.
[…]
The policing of other’s emotional expressions is one sign that the discourse is colonizing our emotional life. Such policing tends to generate an artificiality of (usually negative or critical) emotional expression, and conditions us to avoid certain (usually positive or earnest) emotional expressions. Under these conditions, emotional life is stunted. The range of legible emotions is constricted. Complex or subtle emotional experiences are overwhelmed by the demand for intense and uncomplicated emotional expressions. Source: Impoverished Emotional Lives | The Convivial Society
Image: DALL-E 2 (“policing emotions, in the style of Leonid Afremov”)
They say that technical innovation often comes from the porn industry, but the same is true of new forms of censorship.
[…]
[N]o modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with “go nuts, show nuts” in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible….
[…]
If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs. Source: Matt on Tumblr | Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022
Image: Alexander Grey on Unsplash
I think the comment at the end of this article about people being wary of Stadia because Google tends to shut down services is spot-on. I really liked Stadia, and bought five controllers which I either used within our family or gifted.
During the pandemic, I completed Sniper Elite 4 and all of the DLCs via Stadia. I bought FIFA 22 and Cyberpunk 2077 at full-price as I crossed my fingers behind my back hoping the service would survive.
Ultimately, being refunded for hardware purchases and games I bought is a win-win situation for me. I cancelled my Stadia Pro account earlier this year, dabbling first with Xbox Game Cloud via a Razer Kishi, then upgrading my PlayStation Plus account on the PS5, and more recently investing in a Steam Deck.
[…]
Google Stadia never lived up to its initial promise. The service, which ran a game in the cloud and sent each individual frame of video down to your computer or phone, was pitched as a gaming platform that would benefit from Google’s worldwide scale and streaming expertise. While it was a trailblazing service, competitors quickly popped up with better scale, better hardware, better relationships with developers, and better games. The service didn’t take off immediately and reportedly undershot Google’s estimates by “hundreds of thousands” of users. Google then quickly defunded the division, involving the high-profile closure of its in-house development studio before it could make a single game.
[…]
Google’s damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it.
As a former teacher, I almost cried reading this. Can someone with some authority and leadership stand up and say not only was Brexit a terrible idea, but the current government’s fiscal “strategy” will absolutely break this country?
[…]
One school in Lewisham, south-east London, told the charity about a child who was “pretending to eat out of an empty lunchbox” because they did not qualify for free school meals and did not want their friends to know there was no food at home.
Community food aid groups also told the Observer this week that they are struggling to cope with new demand from families unable to feed their children. “We are hearing about kids who are so hungry they are eating rubbers in school,” said Naomi Duncan, chief executive of Chefs in Schools. “Kids are coming in having not eaten anything since lunch the day before. The government has to do something.” Source: Schools in England warn of crisis of ‘heartbreaking’ rise in hungry children | The Guardian
I turn 42 later this year, and this would explain a lot. Not in terms of me being unable to be super-efficient and productive, but just in terms of seeing connections everywhere.
[…]
Early on, in our teenage and young adult years, the brain seems to have numerous, partitioned networks with high levels of inner connectivity, reflecting the ability for specialized processing to occur. That makes sense, as this is the time when we are learning how to play sports, speak languages, and develop talents. Around our mid-40s, however, that starts to change. Instead, the brain begins becoming less connected within those separate networks and more connected globally across networks. By the time we reach our 80s, the brain tends to be less regionally specialized and instead broadly connected and integrated.
[…]
I finally caved and bought a Steam Deck this week. I’ve loads of Steam games that I’ve collected over the years and some of them are amazing on the Deck. GRID motorsport, for example, as well as Star Wars Squadrons.
This list is a reminder to myself to explore some other, different kinds of games that I don’t usually play.
A timely reminder via Emma Cragg’s latest newsletter that sharing our own perspective is enough. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of the author’s daughter’s curl at the bottom of the newsletter as a reminder than not everything has to be ‘the best’ to have value.
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Yet my questioning of my work bypasses an important truth: no one else can do my work because no one else is me. And no one else can do your work because no one else is you. When I write, I write with my entire being: my lived experience and history, my genes and blood, my vision and longing, my grief and hope, my path and where I come from, my vantage point and opinion, my heart and soul — things only I have that cannot be replicated. Similarly, only you can do the work you do — whether it’s parenting or creating art, working on cars or computers, gardening or running, performing or teaching — only you can do what you do in the exact way you do it.
[…]
We easily forget that what we create is part of a web — part of something bigger — part of a huge tapestry of others sharing themselves and their work in the ways only they can, right alongside us. And when we choose to show up for our work, we add to the web in a way that makes life more full, more rich, more beautiful. We place our piece in the tapestry in a way only we can, which enhances the whole of it. We add our voice to a collective choir who may all be saying the same thing, but how much sweeter is it when there’s a whole room of it, a whole stadium, a whole world?
This website, riskyby.design, is a project of the 5Rights Foundation. It does a good job of talking about the benefits and drawbacks of anonymity in a way that isn’t patronising.
Often conflated with privacy, true anonymity - the total absence of personally identifying information - is difficult to achieve in a digital environment where traces of ourselves are left every time we engage with a service. Anonymity is best considered on a continuum, ranging “from the totally anonymous to the thoroughly named”.
People have lots of reasons for being anonymous online. While anonymity affords a degree of protection to people like journalists, whistle-blowers and marginalised users, the lack of traceability that some types of anonymity offer may prevent people from being held accountable for their actions. Source: Risky-By-Design | 5Rights Foundation
Granular permissions between private and public spaces is a hard problem to solve, as this blog post shows.
A few years ago, Apple acquired Color Labs, who were trying to solve the ‘share with contacts based on an ‘elastic social graph’. These days, I imagine this kind of problem being solved by Bonfire.
But I had a problem that was recurring for a while, that is how to share different photos with the different connections that I have. There are photos that I can share publicly, and there are photos that I don’t want some people to see, such as my students, acquaintances, and work-related colleagues, Source: The rings of share – the unsolved problem of sharing | Rukshan’s Blog
I think this is a great post for people who realise that there might be something wrong with the hierarchy-by-default way we run organisations and society. It’s hard not to come away from it feeling a little liberated.
As someone who has spent the last few years in a co-op with consent-based decision-making and a flat structure, however, I don’t buy the ‘hierarchy is here to stay’ nihilism. Instead, although it’s not what we’ve been brought up to be used to, something like sociocratic circles can scale infinitely!
[…]
Why do people climb the ladder? “Because it’s there.” And when they don’t have any other animating goals, the ladder fills a vacuum.
But if you never make the leap from externally-motivated to intrinsically-motivated, this will eventually becomes a serious risk factor for your career. Without an inner compass (and a renewable source of joy), you will struggle to locate and connect with the work that gives your life meaning. You will risk burnout, apathy and a serious lack of fucks given.. Source: The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business) | charity.wtf
Aaron Hirtenstein mentioned this post to me earlier in the week, thinking that it might be useful for a collaborative project on which we’re working.
The idea is to try and prioritise one good thing over another and, as such, seems to be influenced by the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
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An even over statement is a phrase containing two positive things, where the former is prioritized over the latter.
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Some good points in this photo essay, including photography leading to greater compassion as well as political influence.
I had a conversation with my neighbour this week about drones. They were pointing out how invasive they can be, while I was talking about the amazing photographs they can take.
Sure enough, later that day I come across this year’s Drone Photo Award and there’s some absolute stunners in there. The ones of nature are, of course, amazing, but for some reason this one of a Dutch suburb grabbed me as my favourite.
This article uses a common format in Forbes where we follow an individual who just happens to have a product to sell. The story is lightly researched, and told in a way that seems to suggest that innovation comes from white guys.
Still, I’m sharing it because it’s a mainstream discussion of ActivityPub and Scuttlebutt, protocols that underpin federated social networks. Linking to places like planetary.social also normalises the true meaning of ‘community’ as an active verb rather than a passive noun, as well as the notion of co-operatives.
Though blockchains’ decentralized infrastructures might seem perfect for connecting friends on a social network, Henshaw-Plath was eventually turned off by their reliance on cryptocurrency. “Our feeling was that the primary social interaction should be based on intrinsic motivation,” says Henshaw-Plath. “If you integrate financial incentives into everything, then it can make it into a financial game. And then all of a sudden, people aren’t there because of their human connection and collaboration.” Users, it would seem, agree. Steemit fell 94% from its all-time high to about $107 million today.
Henshaw-Plath started looking for alternatives. “Eventually,” he says, “I discovered a protocol created by this guy who lives on a sailboat in New Zealand.”
That is Dominic Tarr, an eccentric, open-source developer who lives just off the coast of Auckland on a Wharram catamaran named Yes Let’s he found on the side of a road. Tired of being unable to send emails to his friends from his Pacific Ocean location, Tarr wrote software that uses technology similar to Apple’s Airdrop to create a protocol that lets anyone build social networks where information moves like gossip, directly from phone to phone—no internet service provider required.
Entrepreneurs using the protocol get to choose their own business models, their own designs and how their systems function. Users, meanwhile, can move freely from network to network. Tarr called the software Secure Scuttlebutt after the cask that stored water on old sailboats, which is also maritime slang for “gossip,” as in conversations held around a water cooler. “Modern capitalism believes that what people want is convenience,” says Tarr. “But I think what people actually want is a sense of control.”
Scuttlebutt itself isn’t supported by venture capital. Instead, taking a page from the way Tim Berners-Lee funded the creation of the World Wide Web, Scuttlebutt is backed by grants that helped jump-start the process. Similar to a distributed autonomous organization (DAO) that connects groups on a blockchain, there are now hundreds of users who personally donate to the cause and an estimated 30,000 people using one of at least six social networks on the protocol. An estimated 4 million more use the largest social protocol, Mastodon, which supports 60 niche social networks, with a rapidly growing pool of blockchain competitors in the works. Source: Jack Dorsey’s Former Boss Is Building A Decentralized Twitter | Forbes
This article uses a common format in Forbes where we follow an individual who just happens to have a product to sell. The story is lightly researched, and told in a way that seems to suggest that innovation comes from white guys.
Still, I’m sharing it because it’s a mainstream discussion of ActivityPub and Scuttlebutt, protocols that underpin federated social networks. Linking to places like planetary.social also normalises the true meaning of ‘community’ as an active verb rather than a passive noun, as well as the notion of co-operatives.
Though blockchains’ decentralized infrastructures might seem perfect for connecting friends on a social network, Henshaw-Plath was eventually turned off by their reliance on cryptocurrency. “Our feeling was that the primary social interaction should be based on intrinsic motivation,” says Henshaw-Plath. “If you integrate financial incentives into everything, then it can make it into a financial game. And then all of a sudden, people aren’t there because of their human connection and collaboration.” Users, it would seem, agree. Steemit fell 94% from its all-time high to about $107 million today.
Henshaw-Plath started looking for alternatives. “Eventually,” he says, “I discovered a protocol created by this guy who lives on a sailboat in New Zealand.”
That is Dominic Tarr, an eccentric, open-source developer who lives just off the coast of Auckland on a Wharram catamaran named Yes Let’s he found on the side of a road. Tired of being unable to send emails to his friends from his Pacific Ocean location, Tarr wrote software that uses technology similar to Apple’s Airdrop to create a protocol that lets anyone build social networks where information moves like gossip, directly from phone to phone—no internet service provider required.
Entrepreneurs using the protocol get to choose their own business models, their own designs and how their systems function. Users, meanwhile, can move freely from network to network. Tarr called the software Secure Scuttlebutt after the cask that stored water on old sailboats, which is also maritime slang for “gossip,” as in conversations held around a water cooler. “Modern capitalism believes that what people want is convenience,” says Tarr. “But I think what people actually want is a sense of control.”
Scuttlebutt itself isn’t supported by venture capital. Instead, taking a page from the way Tim Berners-Lee funded the creation of the World Wide Web, Scuttlebutt is backed by grants that helped jump-start the process. Similar to a distributed autonomous organization (DAO) that connects groups on a blockchain, there are now hundreds of users who personally donate to the cause and an estimated 30,000 people using one of at least six social networks on the protocol. An estimated 4 million more use the largest social protocol, Mastodon, which supports 60 niche social networks, with a rapidly growing pool of blockchain competitors in the works. Source: Jack Dorsey’s Former Boss Is Building A Decentralized Twitter | Forbes
I don’t know anything about Ariel Pontes, the author of this article, other than seeing that they’re a member of the Effective Altruism community. (Which is a small red flag in and of itself, as it tends to be full of hyper-rationalist solutionist dudes.)
However, what I appreciate about this loooooong article is that Pontes applies philosophical concepts I’ve come across before to talk about the different roles language can play across the political divide.
[…]
I don’t know anything about Ariel Pontes, the author of this article, other than seeing that they’re a member of the Effective Altruism community. (Which is a small red flag in and of itself, as it tends to be full of hyper-rationalist solutionist dudes.)
However, what I appreciate about this loooooong article is that Pontes applies philosophical concepts I’ve come across before to talk about the different roles language can play across the political divide.
[…]
A typically thoughtful article from L. M. Sacasas in which they “explore a somewhat eccentric frame by which to consider how we relate to our technologies, particularly those we hold close to our bodies.” It’s worth reading the whole thing, especially if you grew up in a church environment as it will have particular resonance.
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Say, for example, that I desire to be a more patient person. This is a fine and noble desire. I suspect some of you have desired the same for yourselves at various points. But patience is hard to come by. I find myself lacking patience in the crucial moments regardless of how ardently I have desired it. Why might this be the case? I’m sure there’s more than one answer to this question, but we should at least consider the possibility that my failure to cultivate patience stems from the nature of the technological liturgies that structure my experience. Because speed and efficiency are so often the very reason why I turn to technologies of various sorts, I have been conditioning myself to expect something approaching instantaneity in the way the world responds to my demands. If at every possible point I have adopted tools and devices which promise to make things faster and more efficient, I should not be surprised that I have come to be the sort of person who cannot abide delay and frustration.
[…]
The point of the exercise is not to divest ourselves of such liturgies altogether. Like certain low church congregations that claim they have no liturgies, we would only deepen the power of the unnoticed patterns shaping our thought and actions. And, more to the point, we would be ceding this power not to the liturgies themselves, but to the interests served by those who have crafted and designed those liturgies. My loneliness is not assuaged by my habitual use of social media. My anxiety is not meaningfully relieved by the habit of consumption engendered by the liturgies crafted for me by Amazon. My health is not necessarily improved by compulsive use of health tracking apps. Indeed, in the latter case, the relevant liturgies will tempt me to reduce health and flourishing to what the apps can measure and quantify. Source: Taking Stock of Our Technological Liturgies | The Convivial Society
A typically thoughtful article from L. M. Sacasas in which they “explore a somewhat eccentric frame by which to consider how we relate to our technologies, particularly those we hold close to our bodies.” It’s worth reading the whole thing, especially if you grew up in a church environment as it will have particular resonance.
[…]
Say, for example, that I desire to be a more patient person. This is a fine and noble desire. I suspect some of you have desired the same for yourselves at various points. But patience is hard to come by. I find myself lacking patience in the crucial moments regardless of how ardently I have desired it. Why might this be the case? I’m sure there’s more than one answer to this question, but we should at least consider the possibility that my failure to cultivate patience stems from the nature of the technological liturgies that structure my experience. Because speed and efficiency are so often the very reason why I turn to technologies of various sorts, I have been conditioning myself to expect something approaching instantaneity in the way the world responds to my demands. If at every possible point I have adopted tools and devices which promise to make things faster and more efficient, I should not be surprised that I have come to be the sort of person who cannot abide delay and frustration.
[…]
The point of the exercise is not to divest ourselves of such liturgies altogether. Like certain low church congregations that claim they have no liturgies, we would only deepen the power of the unnoticed patterns shaping our thought and actions. And, more to the point, we would be ceding this power not to the liturgies themselves, but to the interests served by those who have crafted and designed those liturgies. My loneliness is not assuaged by my habitual use of social media. My anxiety is not meaningfully relieved by the habit of consumption engendered by the liturgies crafted for me by Amazon. My health is not necessarily improved by compulsive use of health tracking apps. Indeed, in the latter case, the relevant liturgies will tempt me to reduce health and flourishing to what the apps can measure and quantify. Source: Taking Stock of Our Technological Liturgies | The Convivial Society
Coda Hale was, until last year, Principal Engineer at MailChimp. As a result, they seamless mix in words and equations in this article that betray an engineering background.
You shouldn’t let that put you off, though, as this deep dive into organisational design is absolutely worth it. I want to quote two sections in particular, but go and read the whole thing!
The first bit, is the difference between the way that management visualises the structure of an organisation versus how it actually works. Hale explains this as the difference between things that look like they’re working in parallel but which actually sequential:
A commonly applied but rarely successful strategy is using external resources–e.g. consultants, agencies, staff augmentation–as an end-run around contention on internal resources. While the consultants can indeed move quickly in a low-contention environment, integrating their work product back into the contended resources often has the effect of… a quadratic spike in wait times which increases utilization which in turn produces a superlinear spike in wait times… Successful strategies for reducing contention include increasing the number of instances of a shared resource (e.g., adding bathrooms as we add employees) and developing stateless heuristics for coordinating access to shared resources (e.g., grouping employees into teams).
As with heavily layered applications, the more distance between those designing the organization and the work being done, the greater the risk of unmanaged points of contention. Top-down organizational methods can lead to subdivisions which seem like parallel efforts when listed on a slide but which are, in actuality, highly interdependent and interlocking. Staffing highly sequential efforts as if they were entirely parallel leads to catastrophe. I’ve definitely been in the situation as a consultant multiple times where we’re used as a way to get around organisational inefficiencies. But then when you plug the work back into the organisation, you have to sit and wait until the next bit of work comes along. There’s no rhythm to it, which is annoying for everyone. It’s incoherent.
So the best thing to do, whether you’re working with outside people/orgs or not, is to limit the number of people who need to be consulted as part of processes:
In terms of organizational design, this means limiting both the types and numbers of consulted constituencies in the organization’s process. Each additional person or group in a responsibility assignment matrix geometrically increases the area of that matrix. Each additional responsibility assignment in that matrix geometrically increases the cost of organizational coherence.
It’s also worth noting that these pair-wise communications don’t need to be formal, planned, or even well-known in order to have costs. Neither your employee handbook nor your calendar are accurate depictions of how work in the organization is done. Unless your organization is staffed with zombies, members of the organization will constantly be subverting standard operating procedure in order to get actual work done. Even ants improvise. An accurate accounting of these hidden costs can only be developed via an honest, blameless, and continuous end-to-end analysis of the work as it is happening. This is an article I’ll be coming back to!
Source: Work Is Work | codahale.com
Image: CC BY-NC-SA LockRikard
Coda Hale was, until last year, Principal Engineer at MailChimp. As a result, they seamless mix in words and equations in this article that betray an engineering background.
You shouldn’t let that put you off, though, as this deep dive into organisational design is absolutely worth it. I want to quote two sections in particular, but go and read the whole thing!
The first bit, is the difference between the way that management visualises the structure of an organisation versus how it actually works. Hale explains this as the difference between things that look like they’re working in parallel but which actually sequential:
A commonly applied but rarely successful strategy is using external resources–e.g. consultants, agencies, staff augmentation–as an end-run around contention on internal resources. While the consultants can indeed move quickly in a low-contention environment, integrating their work product back into the contended resources often has the effect of… a quadratic spike in wait times which increases utilization which in turn produces a superlinear spike in wait times… Successful strategies for reducing contention include increasing the number of instances of a shared resource (e.g., adding bathrooms as we add employees) and developing stateless heuristics for coordinating access to shared resources (e.g., grouping employees into teams).
As with heavily layered applications, the more distance between those designing the organization and the work being done, the greater the risk of unmanaged points of contention. Top-down organizational methods can lead to subdivisions which seem like parallel efforts when listed on a slide but which are, in actuality, highly interdependent and interlocking. Staffing highly sequential efforts as if they were entirely parallel leads to catastrophe. I’ve definitely been in the situation as a consultant multiple times where we’re used as a way to get around organisational inefficiencies. But then when you plug the work back into the organisation, you have to sit and wait until the next bit of work comes along. There’s no rhythm to it, which is annoying for everyone. It’s incoherent.
So the best thing to do, whether you’re working with outside people/orgs or not, is to limit the number of people who need to be consulted as part of processes:
In terms of organizational design, this means limiting both the types and numbers of consulted constituencies in the organization’s process. Each additional person or group in a responsibility assignment matrix geometrically increases the area of that matrix. Each additional responsibility assignment in that matrix geometrically increases the cost of organizational coherence.
It’s also worth noting that these pair-wise communications don’t need to be formal, planned, or even well-known in order to have costs. Neither your employee handbook nor your calendar are accurate depictions of how work in the organization is done. Unless your organization is staffed with zombies, members of the organization will constantly be subverting standard operating procedure in order to get actual work done. Even ants improvise. An accurate accounting of these hidden costs can only be developed via an honest, blameless, and continuous end-to-end analysis of the work as it is happening. This is an article I’ll be coming back to!
Source: Work Is Work | codahale.com
Image: CC BY-NC-SA LockRikard
My views on monarchy are, well, that there shouldn’t be one in my country, nor should there be any in the world. This post by Ethan Zuckerman goes into three levels of reaction around the death of Elizabeth II, but more interestingly explains his thinking behind a new experimental course he’s running this semester.
Second – and this one has taken me more time to understand – the public sphere includes at least three components: a way of knowing what’s going on in the world (news), a space for discussing public life, and whatever precursors allow individuals to participate in these discussions. For Habermas’s public sphere, those precursors included being male, wealthy, white, urban and literate… hence the need for Nancy Fraser’s recognition of subaltern counterpublics. Public schooling and libraries are anchored in the idea of enabling people to participate in the public sphere.
The third idea is that as technology and economic models change, all three of these components – the nature of news, discourse, and access – change as well. The obvious change we’re focused on is the displacement of a broadcast public sphere by a highly participatory digital public sphere, but we can see previous moments of upheaval: the rise of mass media with the penny press, the rise of propaganda as broadcast media puts increased control of the public sphere in the hands of corporations and governments. Source: The Monarchy, the Subaltern and the Public Sphere | Ethan Zuckerman
My views on monarchy are, well, that there shouldn’t be one in my country, nor should there be any in the world. This post by Ethan Zuckerman goes into three levels of reaction around the death of Elizabeth II, but more interestingly explains his thinking behind a new experimental course he’s running this semester.
Second – and this one has taken me more time to understand – the public sphere includes at least three components: a way of knowing what’s going on in the world (news), a space for discussing public life, and whatever precursors allow individuals to participate in these discussions. For Habermas’s public sphere, those precursors included being male, wealthy, white, urban and literate… hence the need for Nancy Fraser’s recognition of subaltern counterpublics. Public schooling and libraries are anchored in the idea of enabling people to participate in the public sphere.
The third idea is that as technology and economic models change, all three of these components – the nature of news, discourse, and access – change as well. The obvious change we’re focused on is the displacement of a broadcast public sphere by a highly participatory digital public sphere, but we can see previous moments of upheaval: the rise of mass media with the penny press, the rise of propaganda as broadcast media puts increased control of the public sphere in the hands of corporations and governments. Source: The Monarchy, the Subaltern and the Public Sphere | Ethan Zuckerman
Gareth Fearn argues, and I absolutely agree, that governments are so captured by neoliberal thinking that some types of companies or sectors are seen as “too big to fail”. This leads to them being bailed out, which is a capitulation to a kind of ‘ransom capitalism’.
British politicians’ responses to soaring energy prices conform to the bailout consensus. Boris Johnson is promising ‘extra cash’, though leaving it up to his successor to work out the details (Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have so far mostly offered tax cuts). Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, recently proposed an ‘energy furlough scheme’: the government would absorb the cost of rising energy prices and get some of the money back with a windfall tax. Labour soon followed suit, offering a similar cap to energy prices funded through some slightly more creative accounting.
In both cases, energy companies would receive large amounts of public money (at least £29 billion) to enable them to continue charging their customers sums that many cannot afford. With these proposals following so closely behind the pandemic bailouts, which had the backing of all UK parties, we can see there is broad support for such extraordinary interventions with very little thought being given to the causes of the crisis – beyond criticism of the outgoing prime minister’s personality.
[…]
There is an underlying assumption that at some point there will be a return to the ‘normality’ of self-regulating markets of private actors. But bailouts without structural change keep us on the path of ever-increasing losses for the public just to sustain the basics of life, while maintaining a failed market system which is not only generating crises but limiting responses to them – as many nations in the Global South have experienced for decades.
High inflation is not unique to the UK, but the capitulation to the energy companies’ ransom demands seems especially acute here, as is the actual rate of rising costs. France is able to lower prices through its state energy company, Spain and Germany have intervened to reduce the cost of public transport, and many of the proposed measures across Europe involve taking equity in energy companies or stricter regulation. But the UK is too far down the neoliberal rabbit-hole even to countenance such mild social democratic policies. Source: Ransom Capitalism | London Review of Books
Gareth Fearn argues, and I absolutely agree, that governments are so captured by neoliberal thinking that some types of companies or sectors are seen as “too big to fail”. This leads to them being bailed out, which is a capitulation to a kind of ‘ransom capitalism’.
British politicians’ responses to soaring energy prices conform to the bailout consensus. Boris Johnson is promising ‘extra cash’, though leaving it up to his successor to work out the details (Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have so far mostly offered tax cuts). Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, recently proposed an ‘energy furlough scheme’: the government would absorb the cost of rising energy prices and get some of the money back with a windfall tax. Labour soon followed suit, offering a similar cap to energy prices funded through some slightly more creative accounting.
In both cases, energy companies would receive large amounts of public money (at least £29 billion) to enable them to continue charging their customers sums that many cannot afford. With these proposals following so closely behind the pandemic bailouts, which had the backing of all UK parties, we can see there is broad support for such extraordinary interventions with very little thought being given to the causes of the crisis – beyond criticism of the outgoing prime minister’s personality.
[…]
There is an underlying assumption that at some point there will be a return to the ‘normality’ of self-regulating markets of private actors. But bailouts without structural change keep us on the path of ever-increasing losses for the public just to sustain the basics of life, while maintaining a failed market system which is not only generating crises but limiting responses to them – as many nations in the Global South have experienced for decades.
High inflation is not unique to the UK, but the capitulation to the energy companies’ ransom demands seems especially acute here, as is the actual rate of rising costs. France is able to lower prices through its state energy company, Spain and Germany have intervened to reduce the cost of public transport, and many of the proposed measures across Europe involve taking equity in energy companies or stricter regulation. But the UK is too far down the neoliberal rabbit-hole even to countenance such mild social democratic policies. Source: Ransom Capitalism | London Review of Books
I love this article about, variously, work-life balance, the future of work, quiet quitting, and the ridiculousness of Silicon Valley culture. To be honest, I feel very fortunate to not have to put up with any of this bullshit in my day-to-day work.
[…]
I’d love to be flip and just say that, at this point in planetary decline, anyone who’s a little too interested in emails and Google Docs basically counts as a try-hard, but there’s a specific category of salaryfolk and company leadership provoking a justifiable kind of scorn. The professional try-hard I’m talking about is someone who, in the year 2022, still earnestly and performatively buys into the white-collar hustle and prides themselves on it. You know this person. They’re a cross between a teacher’s pet and a supply-room narc; if they’re not already a manager, they certainly aim to be one day. While everyone else got with the program that trying hard at work—against a political and national backdrop that feels like daily, endless crisis—is ridiculous, or worse, meaningless, these guys (it’s not exclusively a male thing, of course, but I’m not not being gendered on purpose) haven’t quite gotten with the program.
[…]
What’s clear—and what’s behind the reason that professional try-hards are flailing so fantastically—is that the very concept of corporate competence itself has become a joke. The ideals that white-collar striving is built upon have started to crumble: Imagine believing in true “innovation” in a world where Meta, formerly the most exciting company on earth, is reduced to hitting copy and paste. Imagine still buying into the corporate ladder in any sector where performance evaluations might be rife with racial disparities, or where the executives have essentially admitted on the stand that their entire industry is just a game of roulette. Imagine having faith at all in any idea of “corporate good” when the guy celebrated for years as the “one moral CEO in America” is now the subject of a rape investigation (that CEO has denied the allegations). Just last month, Adam Neumann, the disgraced WeWork founder whose implosion was so well-documented that it got turned into prestige television, reportedly received a $350 million second chance for pretty much the same idea he rode to ruin last time.
Imagine, in other words, believing anyone in charge knows what they’re doing. But okay, sure, sic the productivity-management software on everyone else to make sure we’re not online shopping a touch too much. Source: The Professional Try-Hard Is Dead, But You Still Need to Return to the Office | Vanity Fair
I love this article about, variously, work-life balance, the future of work, quiet quitting, and the ridiculousness of Silicon Valley culture. To be honest, I feel very fortunate to not have to put up with any of this bullshit in my day-to-day work.
[…]
I’d love to be flip and just say that, at this point in planetary decline, anyone who’s a little too interested in emails and Google Docs basically counts as a try-hard, but there’s a specific category of salaryfolk and company leadership provoking a justifiable kind of scorn. The professional try-hard I’m talking about is someone who, in the year 2022, still earnestly and performatively buys into the white-collar hustle and prides themselves on it. You know this person. They’re a cross between a teacher’s pet and a supply-room narc; if they’re not already a manager, they certainly aim to be one day. While everyone else got with the program that trying hard at work—against a political and national backdrop that feels like daily, endless crisis—is ridiculous, or worse, meaningless, these guys (it’s not exclusively a male thing, of course, but I’m not not being gendered on purpose) haven’t quite gotten with the program.
[…]
What’s clear—and what’s behind the reason that professional try-hards are flailing so fantastically—is that the very concept of corporate competence itself has become a joke. The ideals that white-collar striving is built upon have started to crumble: Imagine believing in true “innovation” in a world where Meta, formerly the most exciting company on earth, is reduced to hitting copy and paste. Imagine still buying into the corporate ladder in any sector where performance evaluations might be rife with racial disparities, or where the executives have essentially admitted on the stand that their entire industry is just a game of roulette. Imagine having faith at all in any idea of “corporate good” when the guy celebrated for years as the “one moral CEO in America” is now the subject of a rape investigation (that CEO has denied the allegations). Just last month, Adam Neumann, the disgraced WeWork founder whose implosion was so well-documented that it got turned into prestige television, reportedly received a $350 million second chance for pretty much the same idea he rode to ruin last time.
Imagine, in other words, believing anyone in charge knows what they’re doing. But okay, sure, sic the productivity-management software on everyone else to make sure we’re not online shopping a touch too much. Source: The Professional Try-Hard Is Dead, But You Still Need to Return to the Office | Vanity Fair
This is a great article by Michał Woźniak (@rysiek) which cogently argues that the problem with misinformation and disinformation does not come through heavy-handed legislation, or even fact-checking, but rather through decentralisation of funding, technology, and power.
I really should have spoken with him when I was working on the Bonfire Zappa report.
This is especially valid within any domain that deals with complex knowledge that is highly nuanced, especially when stakes are high and emotions heat up. Public debate around COVID-19 is a chilling example. Regardless of how much “own research” anyone has done, for those without an advanced medical and scientific background it eventually boiled down to the question of “who do you trust”. Some trusted medical professionals, some didn’t (and still don’t).
[…]
Disinformation peddlers are not just trying to push specific narratives. The broader aim is to discredit the very idea that there can at all exist any reliable, trustworthy information source. After all, if nothing is trustworthy, the disinformation peddlers themselves are as trustworthy as it gets. The target is trust itself.
[…]
I believe that we are looking for solutions to the wrong aspects of the problem. Instead of trying to legislate misinformation and disinformation away, we should instead be looking closely at how is it possible that it spreads so fast (and who benefits from this). We should be finding ways to fix the media funding crisis; and we should be making sure that future generations receive the mental tools that would allow them to cut through biases, hoaxes, rhetorical tricks, and logical fallacies weaponized to wage information wars. Source: Fighting Disinformation: We’re Solving The Wrong Problems / Tactical Media Room
This is a great article by Michał Woźniak (@rysiek) which cogently argues that the problem with misinformation and disinformation does not come through heavy-handed legislation, or even fact-checking, but rather through decentralisation of funding, technology, and power.
I really should have spoken with him when I was working on the Bonfire Zappa report.
This is especially valid within any domain that deals with complex knowledge that is highly nuanced, especially when stakes are high and emotions heat up. Public debate around COVID-19 is a chilling example. Regardless of how much “own research” anyone has done, for those without an advanced medical and scientific background it eventually boiled down to the question of “who do you trust”. Some trusted medical professionals, some didn’t (and still don’t).
[…]
Disinformation peddlers are not just trying to push specific narratives. The broader aim is to discredit the very idea that there can at all exist any reliable, trustworthy information source. After all, if nothing is trustworthy, the disinformation peddlers themselves are as trustworthy as it gets. The target is trust itself.
[…]
I believe that we are looking for solutions to the wrong aspects of the problem. Instead of trying to legislate misinformation and disinformation away, we should instead be looking closely at how is it possible that it spreads so fast (and who benefits from this). We should be finding ways to fix the media funding crisis; and we should be making sure that future generations receive the mental tools that would allow them to cut through biases, hoaxes, rhetorical tricks, and logical fallacies weaponized to wage information wars. Source: Fighting Disinformation: We’re Solving The Wrong Problems / Tactical Media Room
Winter in the UK isn’t much fun, so if we didn’t have kids I would absolutely be working from a different country for part of it. Why not?
This is not a new thing: when I worked at Mozilla (2012-15) I almost moved to Gozo, a little island off Malta, as I could work from anywhere. So long as people are productive, and you can interact with them at times that work for everyone, what’s the problem?
But for an unknown number of people, there is another reason as well: They can’t come in, because they secretly don’t live in the same state or even country anymore.
The issue is larger than it may seem, and many companies are struggling to deal with “employees relocating themselves to ‘nicer’ places to work without letting the business know,” said Robby Wogan, the CEO of global mobility company MoveAssist. One survey performed on behalf of the HR company Topia found that as many as 40 percent of HR professionals had recently discovered that employees were working outside their home state or country, and that only 46 percent were “very confident” they know where most of their workers are, down from 60 percent just last year.
That uncertainty appears justified. In the same survey, 66 percent of the 1,500 full-time employees surveyed in the U.S. and U.S. said they did not tell human resources about all the dates they worked outside of their state or country, and 94 percent said they believe they should be able to work wherever they want if their work gets done. Source: Some WFH Employees Have a Secret: They Now Live in Another Country | VICE
It’s worth clicking through to the Axios summary of some recent research showing that people underestimate the impact of small acts of kindness.
I notice this in my own life: when I’m driving, if another driver smiles and allows me to merge into the queue, I’m more likely to do it to others; if I check in on people and ask how they’re doing, they more likely to do it to me. And so on.
The notorious website kiwi farms is no longer being protected by Cloudflare’s CDN (Content Delivery Network). This means that it is itself subject to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and other cybersecurity risks.
It’s been a long time coming. I agree with Ryan Broderick’s take on this, that websites are like street corners, and it helps them to be conceptualised as such.
Which is a good line. I’m sure people who are old enough to remember when telephones weren’t computers love it. But I’m not really sure it works here. Telephones are not publishing platforms, nor are they searchable public records. Comparing a message board that has around nine million visitors a month to someone saying something racist on the telephone is, actually, nuts.
But, more broadly, I don’t even think this is a free speech issue. Cloudflare isn’t a government entity and it’s not putting Kiwi Farms members in jail. In fact, it seems like some users have done that themselves. A German woman seems to have accidentally exposed her real identity amid the constant migration of the site and now may be charged for cyberstalking. Instead, Cloudflare, a private company, has removed their protection from the site, which allows activists and hackers to DDoS it, taking it down.
[…]
Websites are not similar to telephones. They are not even similar to books or magazines. They are street corners, they are billboards, they are parks, they are shopping malls, they are spaces where people congregate. Just because you cannot see the (hopefully) tens of thousands of other people reading this blog post right now doesn’t mean they’re not there. And that is doubly true for a user-generated content platform. And regardless of the right to free speech and the right to assemble guaranteed in America, if the crowd you bring together in a physical space starts to threaten people, even if they’re doing it in the periphery of your audience, the private security company you hired as crowd control no longer has to support you. To me, it’s honestly just that simple. Source: A website is a street corner | by Ryan Broderick
Image: Karol Smoczynski | Unsplash
If you’re consistently over-stretched, you’re doing it wrong. And if you’re not doing it wrong, your organisation is.
Are you too busy because the business has expectations for you to deliver by a certain date regardless of the capacity of your team (who are delivering high quality work and always working on the next most important thing as prioritised by the business)? Then that is a conversation that you need to have with your boss and your stakeholders. That is likely unreasonable.
[…]
You and your team should never be so busy that you can’t do your job properly or that you begin to hate your work. Especially if you’re a leader or a leader-of-leaders, then you should actually (yes you should, I’ll die on this hill) have free time to think alone, and to talk and ideate organically with peers. Contrary to popular belief: back-to-back meetings isn’t a badge of honour, it’s a red flag. Source: Why are you so busy? | Tom Lingham
Image: DALL-E 2
There’s something about having a cup of tea that’s very different to having a cup of coffee. They’re both a means to an end, but the ends differ massively.
[…]
If you are sleep deprived tea will not give you a jolt of fleeting alertness to get through another day and help delay confronting the issue that you aren’t getting enough quality sleep. If you have masses of work and a tight deadline, tea will not give you a ‘Limitless’ style ability to get it done despite the odds. If anything tea could slow you down. I can’t envision a montage in one of those interminable, never-ending TV series where the group of lawyers or programmers or detectives have to pull an all-nighter beginning with the team getting out the single origin Assam and their best China.
[…]
We intuitively know that the tea itself is probably a nothing in and by itself, and that it probably does nothing in and by itself, but that this a nothing we can ritualise and return to as a refuge from the pressures of the day to day. In a world overstuffed with disorder and frantic activity, calm is found not in a location but in a ritual. It is found by enjoying an end-in-itself pleasure that promises nothing but itself. And that’s all it needs to be. Source: On Tea and the Art of Doing Nothing | Thomas J Bevan
Research. Build. Test. Repeat.
Not endless talking and pontification.
[…]
This endless pondering introduces years and years of unnecessary delays. But worse: it kills the will to build. There is nothing builders hate more than endless meetings with people who can’t even spell “CPU.”
You know you’ve lost when they’ve internalized the conservative voices, which can now stop them without even having to try. It’s when your intern has a neat idea for something he could hack together in a few hours — but then thinks, what’s the point? Source: The Dictatorship of the Articulate | Florent Crivello
I used to have a quotation on the wall as a History teacher that said “opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work”. It’s been attributed to several people, but it’s the point that’s important: opportunities arrive in life, but you have to be looking for them.
Previously, I’ve called this (on my now defunct Discours.es blog) increasing your serendipity surface. In this post, Rob Miller breaks it down into three parts, which is interesting.
But we’re also surrounded at all times by unnoticed novelty, which links to the second factor: the extent to which we notice and respond positively to novel situations. There are countless ways to respond poorly to novelty. We can ignore it; we can notice it but greet it with indifference; we can fear it; we can attack it, as we might if it runs counter to our existing beliefs. All of these responses ensure the snuffing out of serendipity. The only response that allows for serendipity is improvisation: embracing novelty and making it a part of what you do. Source: Cultivating serendipity | Roblog, the blog of Rob Miller
A bit of fun from xkcd, but with some underlying truth in terms of how people experience life almost as if it were different product tiers.
Source: xkcd: Universe Price Tiers
Art is a social thing. So it does not surprise me at all that people are upset that an AI-generated artwork won a competition.
However, after spending some time today (and in previous weeks) messing about with Midjourney and DALL-E 2 there’s a real talent to ‘prompt-crafting’. You can create amazing things, but not just by whacking in a bunch of words. Unless you’re very lucky.
Perhaps a ‘competition’ isn’t the best way to show off art. And perhaps selling individual works isn’t the best way to fund it?
Allen used Midjourney—a commercial image synthesis model available through a Discord server—to create a series of three images. He then upscaled them, printed them on canvas, and submitted them to the competition in early August. To his delight, one of the images (titled Théåtre D’opéra Spatial) captured the top prize, and he posted about his victory on the Midjourney Discord server on Friday.
Source: AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans | Ars Technica
This is an interesting post that uses Google Maps as a metaphor for learning. In other words, get from where you are, to where you need to be, using an optimal route.
The author did some research, built pathways based on the findings, and presented them back to users. Who didn’t like them.
A similar approach was used in the Mozilla Discover project around Open Badges which is written up on Badge Wiki. The difference there, I guess, was that people were able to recognise specific inflection points that had meaning for them, and ascribe badges.
My opinion would be that people learn in different ways because of the context they bring to the table. You can rely on certain things to inspire most people, for example, or other things to resonate with some people. But there’s always a bit of experimentation to learning. It’s more like improvisational jazz than a symphony!
So, we do learn through pathways, but those pathways only have certain parts of the journey in common. To use another metaphor, it’s a bit like sharing a bus journey with other passengers for several stops, before getting on another bus (or hitch-hiking, or taking a taxi, or…)
I asked them to describe their musical career, I let them know I wanted to create a timeline of their story, to start at the very beginning, and then to take me step by step through to their successes of today. Then I sat back and started to take notes:
Their first experience with music may have been with their mom who played the guitar, a lead singer they had a crush on, or a drum kit they got as a 5-year-old. They learned some key lessons and their journey kicked off. Over time, they may have learned to sing in Church, or worked in a recording studio. Some went to school, where they were introduced to new ideas from their peers, started a band, or trained underneath a mentor. Many went in completely different directions, they first become a chef, worked on a boat, or started bartending, each experience taught them skills they would later apply to their music. As they shared their experiences, I took notes, not about the events, the characters, or places, but only on the things they learned and when. I was mapping out their learning journeys, step by step, from their first experiences to their current work. I made an effort to cut through the superficial, and get to the heart of the lessons learned, this required the musician to deeply introspect, and was a fascinating experience on its own.
Several weeks later, after they had forgotten about the interviews and I had time to map each story out, I presented it back to them. But not as a story of their lives, instead, as a course, I wanted to run by them and get their professional opinion on. “What do you think of this course” “Do you think this is a good structure for a course?” I asked. They did not know this course was modeled after their own stories, they did not have any reason to tie this course back to the interviews conducted some months back and their responses were resounding: “This is a terribly designed course!” “How could you even think of wasting my time with this”, “Don’t you know that you need to understand X before you learn Y”… More on this in this blog post about the session we ran at The Badge Summit on designing for recognition. Be sure to click through to the accompanying slide deck and the constellation model approach in slides 16 and 24!
Source: We dont learn through pathways | Dev4X
I read this article when it was published on Low-tech Magazine earlier this year. Given the cost of living crisis is being exacerbated by gas prices this winter, Team Belshaw will be using hot water bottles as personal, portable heating solutions!
[…]
Hot water bottles can be combined with a blanket, which further increases thermal comfort. If I put a blanket over the lower part of my body when seated at my desk, it traps the heat from the bottles and keeps them warm for longer. Even better is a blanket with a hole in the middle to stick your head through – a basic poncho – or a blanket with sleeves. If it’s large enough, it creates a tent-like structure that puts your whole body in the warm microclimate created by the water bottles. Draping long clothes over a personal heat source was a common comfort strategy in earlier times. Source: The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle | Low-tech Magazine
I’m sharing this as an potentially-optimistic vision of another way of creating a lot of energy for the world. As the article states, this particular version might not be it, but sea waves contain a lot of energy…
That doesn’t mean people aren’t trying – we’ve seen many tidal energy ideas and projects over the years, and just as many dedicated to pulling in wave energy for use on land. There are a lot of prototypes and small-scale commercial installations either running or under construction, and the sector remains optimistic that it’ll make a significant clean energy contribution in years to come.
[…]
SWEL claims “one single Waveline Magnet will be rated at over 100 MW in energetic environments,” and the inventor and CEO, Adam Zakheos, is quoted in a press release as saying “… we can show how a commercial sized device using our technology will achieve a Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) less than 1c€(US$0.01)/kWhr, crushing today’s wave energy industry reference value of 85c€ (US$0.84)/kWh …”
[…]
[T]hese kinds of promises are where these yellow sea monsters start smelling a tad fishy to us. Despite many years of wave tank testing, SWEL says it’s still putting the results together, with “performance & scale-up projections, numerical and techno-financial modeling, feasibility studies and technology performance level” information yet to be released.
[…]
If SWEL delivers on its promises, well, you’re looking at nothing short of a clean energy revolution – one it’s increasingly obvious that the planet desperately needs, even if it comes in the form of yet more plastic floating in the ocean. But with investors lining up to throw money at green energy moonshots, the space has no shortage of bad-faith operators, wishful thinking and inflated expectations. And if SWEL’s many tests had generated the kinds of results that extrapolate to some of the world’s cheapest and cleanest energy, well, we’d expect to see a little more progress, some Gates-level investment flowing in, and more than an apparent sub-10 head count driving this thing along. Source: Wave-riding generators promise the cheapest clean energy ever | New Atlas
Will MacAskill is an Oxford philosopher. He’s an influential member of the Effective Altruism movement and has a view of the world he calls ‘longtermism’. I don’t know him, and I haven’t read his book, but I have done some ethics as part of my Philosophy degree.
As a parent, I find this review of his most recent book pretty shocking. I’m willing to consider most ideas but utilitarianism is the kind of thing which is super-attractive as a first-year Philosophy student but which… you grow out of?
The review goes more into depth than I can here, but human beings are not cold, calculating machines. We’re emotional people. We’re parents. And all I can say is that, well, my worldview changed a lot after I became a father.
Now, as many have noted since its origin, utilitarianism is a radically counterintuitive moral view. It tells us that we cannot give more weight to our own interests or the interests of those we love than the interests of perfect strangers. We must sacrifice everything for the greater good. Worse, it tells us that we should do so by any effective means: if we can shave 0.0001 percent off the probability of human extinction by killing a million people, we should—so long as there are no other adverse effects.
[…]
MacAskill spends a lot of time and effort asking how to benefit future people. What I’ll come back to is the moral question whether they matter in the way he thinks they do, and why. As it turns out, MacAskill’s moral revolution rests on contentious, counterintuitive claims in “population ethics.”
[…]
[W]hat is most alarming in his approach is how little he is alarmed. As of 2022, the ‘Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ set the Doomsday Clock, which measures our proximity to doom, at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. According to a study commissioned by MacAskill, however, even in the worst-case scenario—a nuclear war that kills 99 percent of us—society would likely survive. The future trillions would be safe. The same goes for climate change. MacAskill is upbeat about our chances of surviving seven degrees of warming or worse: “even with fifteen degrees of warming,” he contends, “the heat would not pass lethal limits for crops in most regions.”
This is shocking in two ways. First, because it conflicts with credible claims one reads elsewhere. The last time the temperature was six degree higher than preindustrial levels was 251 million years ago, in the Permian-Triassic Extinction, the most devastating of the five great extinctions. Deserts reached almost to the Arctic and more than 90 percent of species were wiped out. According to environmental journalist Mark Lynas, who synthesized current research in ‘Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency’ (2020), at six degrees of warming the oceans will become anoxic, killing most marine life, and they’ll begin to release methane hydrate, which is flammable at concentrations of five percent, creating a risk of roving firestorms. It’s not clear how we could survive this hell, let alone fifteen degrees. Source: The New Moral Mathematics | Boston Review
I’m one of those people who has to try hard not to over-analyse everything. Therapy has helped a bit, but I still can’t help reflecting on conversations I’ve had with people outside my family.
Why did that conversation go so well? Why was another one boring? Did I talk too much?
That sort of thing.
Which is why I found this article about ‘conversational doorknobs’ and improvisational comedy fascinating.
Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).
It’s easy to assume that givers are virtuous and takers are villainous, but that’s giver propaganda. Conversations, like improv scenes, start to sink if they sit still. Takers can paddle for both sides, relieving their partners of the duty to generate the next thing. It’s easy to remember how lonely it feels when a taker refuses to cede the spotlight to you, but easy to forget how lovely it feels when you don’t want the spotlight and a taker lets you recline on the mezzanine while they fill the stage. When you’re tired or shy or anxious or bored, there’s nothing better than hopping on the back of a conversational motorcycle, wrapping your arms around your partner’s waist, and holding on for dear life while they rocket you to somewhere new. There’s people I interact with on a semi-regular basis for which I, like other people, am just a convenient person to talk at. It can be entertaining for a while, but can get a bit too much. Likewise, there are others where I feel like I have to do most of the talking, and that’s just tiring.
The best thing is when the two of your have a shared interest and you’re willing to take turns in asking questions and opening doorways. I’m not saying that I’m a particularly skilled conversationalist, but having attended a lot of events during my career, I’m better at it now than I used to be.
What matters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances. Takers can present big, graspable doorknobs (“I get kinda creeped out when couples treat their dogs like babies”) or not (“Let me tell you about the plot of the movie ‘Must Love Dogs’…”). Good taking makes the other side want to take too (“I know! My friends asked me to be the godparent to their Schnauzer, it’s so crazy” “What?? Was there a ceremony?”). Similarly, some questions have doorknobs (“Why do you think you and your brother turned out so different?”) and some don’t (“How many of your grandparents are still living?”). But even affordance-less giving can be met with affordance-ful taking (“I have one grandma still alive, and I think a lot about all this knowledge she has––how to raise a family, how to cope with tragedy, how to make chocolate zucchini bread––and how I feel anxious about learning from her while I still can”).
[…]
A few unfortunate psychological biases hold us back from creating these conversational doorknobs and from grabbing them when we see them. We think people want to hear about exciting stuff we did without them (“I went to Budapest!”) when they actually are happier talking about mundane stuff we did together (“Remember when we got stuck in traffic driving to DC?”). We overestimate the awkwardness of deep talk and so we stick to the boring, affordance-less shallows. Conversational affordances often require saying something at least a little bit intimate about yourself, so even the faintest fear of rejection on either side can prevent conversations from taking off. That’s why when psychologists want to jump-start friendship in the lab, they have participants answer a series of questions that require steadily escalating amounts of self-disclosure (you may have seen this as “The 36 Questions that Lead to Love”). Source: Good conversations have lots of doorknobs | Experimental History
I’m not really on any of the big centralised social networks any more, but I’m interested in the effect they have on society. Apparently there have been calls recently complaining about, and resisting, changes that Instagram has made.
In this post, Ben Thompson cites Sam Lessin, a former Facebook exec, who suggests we’re at step four of a five-step process.
In another, related, post Charles Arthur scaremongers about how AI-created content will overwhelm us:
In its way, it sounds like the society in Fahrenheit 451 (that’s 233ºC for Europeans) though without the book burning. There’s no need: why read a book when there’s something fascinating you can watch instead?
Quite what effect this has on social warming is unclear. Possibly it accelerates polarisation, but rather like the Facebook Blenderbot, people are just segmented into their own world, and not shown things that will disturb them. Or, perhaps, they’re shown just enough to annoy them and engage them again if their attention seems to be flagging. After all, if you can generate unlimited content, you can do what you want. And as we know, what the companies who do this want is your attention, all the time. As ever, I don’t think we’re ready for this. Not even close.
Sources: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends | Stratechery by Ben Thompson and The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us | Social Warming by Charles Arthur
This article is from a series that Arthur C. Brooks has in The Atlantic entitled ‘How to Build a Life’. He includes four bits of advice but I’m sharing this mainly so I can share my own approach to dealing with general background anxiety and existential angst.
First, I found several years ago that taking L-Theanine tablets every day is a gamechanger. I recommend them to anyone who will listen. And then, recently, I’ve found that running almost every day makes a huge difference. I literally can’t be anxious while running.
I’m writing this outside a coffee shop in Tynemouth. The place is absolutely heaving on a sunny summer’s day, but it’s takeaway only as they can’t get enough staff. Elsewhere, everywhere from postal workers to bin men to lawyers are on strike.
An editorial in Le Monde comments on the “worst crisis since the 1970” in the UK:
This is the sort of crisis that brings down nations.
Image: DALL-E 2
I’m writing this outside a coffee shop in Tynemouth. The place is absolutely heaving on a sunny summer’s day, but it’s takeaway only as they can’t get enough staff. Elsewhere, everywhere from postal workers to bin men to lawyers are on strike.
An editorial in Le Monde comments on the “worst crisis since the 1970” in the UK:
This is the sort of crisis that brings down nations.
Image: DALL-E 2
Hypothes.is is an annotation service. I can’t remember who recommended I follow his annotations, but Chris Aldrich’s gleanings are worth following via RSS.
For example, I never would otherwise have come across this, from a Discord chat room, which got me thinking about roles within networks and communities.
I don’t know anything about the author of this post other than what he’s put on his about page. He doesn’t look very old, and he’s a developer for Just Eat, the food takeaway app. Neither his about page nor this post mention family, which is a massive red flag for me when people are talking about the downsides of working from home.
You see, while he may have problems concentrating, and miss the social element of the office, that’s not true for everyone. It’s particularly not true for those with a family. So I’m posting this as a reminder to myself and others, that context matters.
I want to make a developer-centric argument that the current state of majority remote working is bad, not because it is bad for your company or for your salary but because it is not best for yours and others mental well being. Source: What Tech Workers Don’t Understand They’ve Lost by WFH | Michael Gomes Vieira
It’s no secret that I believe that private schools shouldn’t exist. I’ve explained why so many times over the years I almost don’t know where to link, but try this from 2012, or this from 2019. Ben Werdmuller also shared his thoughts a week ago.
I’m pleased to see this report of comments made by Eddie Jones, England Rugby Union’s head coach on private schools. I think we’re coming to realise, as a society, that more diversity really is better for all of us.
[…]
Jones had claimed in his interview that “you are going to have to blow the whole thing up” as the system yielded young players who struggled to lead because “everything’s done for you”.
“When we are on the front foot we are the best in the world,” Jones added. “When we are not on the front foot our ability to find a way to win, our resolve, is not as it should be." Source: Eddie Jones: England head coach admonished by RFU over private school system criticism | BBC Sport
I have no idea if this has since been debunked, but it’s fascinating to me.
As I’ve said recently elsewhere, I don’t think technical projects do a good enough job to proactively defensively license their outputs. This, I’d say, is why we can’t have nice things.
While I agree with the sentiment around ‘ethical source’ models, the philosopher in me would argue that it’s an absolute minefield.
[…]
So what about developers who don’t want their work to be used to help separate kids from their families or create nonconsensual pornography?
The Ethical Source Movement seeks to use software licenses and other tools to give developers “the freedom and agency to ensure that our work is being used for social good and in service of human rights.” This view emphasizes the rights of developers to have a say in what the fruits of their labor are used for over the rights of any user to use the software for anything. There are a myriad of different licenses: some prohibit software from being used by companies that overwork developers in violation of labor laws, while others prohibit uses that violate human rights or help extract fossil fuels. Is this the thicket Stallman envisions?
[…]
Will people who intend to commit evil acts with software care what a license says or abide by its terms? Well, it depends. While the anonymous users of the deepfake software I studied might still have used it to create nonconsensual porn, even if the license terms prohibited this, Ehmke suggests that corporate misuse is perhaps a more pressing concern: she points to campaigns to prevent software from being used by Palantir and a 2019 report by Amnesty International that raised concerns that the business models of big name technology companies may threaten human rights. Anonymous users on the internet might not care about licenses, but as Ehmke says and my own experience with lawyers in tech companies confirms, “These companies and their lawyers care very much about what a license says.” So while ethical source licenses might not stop all harmful uses, they might stop some. Source: Can you stop your open-source project from being used for evil? | Stack Overflow Blog
As I’ve said recently elsewhere, I don’t think technical projects do a good enough job to proactively defensively license their outputs. This, I’d say, is why we can’t have nice things.
While I agree with the sentiment around ‘ethical source’ models, the philosopher in me would argue that it’s an absolute minefield.
[…]
So what about developers who don’t want their work to be used to help separate kids from their families or create nonconsensual pornography?
The Ethical Source Movement seeks to use software licenses and other tools to give developers “the freedom and agency to ensure that our work is being used for social good and in service of human rights.” This view emphasizes the rights of developers to have a say in what the fruits of their labor are used for over the rights of any user to use the software for anything. There are a myriad of different licenses: some prohibit software from being used by companies that overwork developers in violation of labor laws, while others prohibit uses that violate human rights or help extract fossil fuels. Is this the thicket Stallman envisions?
[…]
Will people who intend to commit evil acts with software care what a license says or abide by its terms? Well, it depends. While the anonymous users of the deepfake software I studied might still have used it to create nonconsensual porn, even if the license terms prohibited this, Ehmke suggests that corporate misuse is perhaps a more pressing concern: she points to campaigns to prevent software from being used by Palantir and a 2019 report by Amnesty International that raised concerns that the business models of big name technology companies may threaten human rights. Anonymous users on the internet might not care about licenses, but as Ehmke says and my own experience with lawyers in tech companies confirms, “These companies and their lawyers care very much about what a license says.” So while ethical source licenses might not stop all harmful uses, they might stop some. Source: Can you stop your open-source project from being used for evil? | Stack Overflow Blog
If you think I’m sharing this image because my name is Doug and I find the accompanying image amusing then you’d be 100% correct.
Being swamped means probably not getting enough rest, making things more complicated than they need to be, wasting time on petty decisions, and not thinking deeply about important decisions.
Now, I’m impressed by people who are not swamped. They prioritize ruthlessly to separate what’s most important from everything else, think deeply about those most-important things, execute them well to make a big impact, do that consistently, and get others around them to do the same. Damn, that’s impressive! Source: Being Swamped is Normal and Not Impressive | Greg Kogan
If you think I’m sharing this image because my name is Doug and I find the accompanying image amusing then you’d be 100% correct.
Being swamped means probably not getting enough rest, making things more complicated than they need to be, wasting time on petty decisions, and not thinking deeply about important decisions.
Now, I’m impressed by people who are not swamped. They prioritize ruthlessly to separate what’s most important from everything else, think deeply about those most-important things, execute them well to make a big impact, do that consistently, and get others around them to do the same. Damn, that’s impressive! Source: Being Swamped is Normal and Not Impressive | Greg Kogan
Well, we can but hope. The backlash from Instagram-obsessed people would be too much for politicians to bear, however…
Indeed, this uncomfortable reality was made clearer last month, when Ireland’s privacy regulator submitted a draft decision to its EU peers that would ban Facebook and Insta from transferring Europeans’ personal data to the U.S., because there is no longer any legal basis for these transfers to continue.
[…]
I find it astonishing that even Facebook’s critics, let alone the markets, haven’t glommed onto the reality of the situation. I suspect the culprit is a deep-seated notion that Mark Zuckerberg’s all-powerful company can somehow fix this by modifying its legendarily bad privacy behavior—as though it had some brilliant solution hidden up its sleeve, just waiting until the last possible second before pulling it out. Source: Even Meta’s critics don’t grasp how likely it is that Facebook and Instagram will soon have to exit Europe | Fortune
Image: created using Midjourney
Any article that quotes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus and talks about the importance of being yourself is a winner.
[…]
BE YOU. Be the only one of you in the whole world. Be the red. That’s where the fun is (without having to fake it). That’s where the money is (you can name your price). That’s where the value is (you can’t be replaced).
[…]
Two thousand years before Peter Thiel said that, “competition is for losers,” Epictetus quipped that, “You can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you.”
[…]
Too many people pointlessly enter contests where the outcome is dependent on forces outside their control. They think it’s safer to be like everyone else…when in fact, what they’re really doing is hiding themselves in the chorus, protecting themselves from judgment. They’re less likely to be singled out and laughed at, sure, but they’re guaranteeing that they’ll never really be noticed or appreciated. Theirs becomes the Indian restaurant that will never be great, but it will never be closed. That is the best you can expect when you’re not playing to win…you’re playing not to lose. Source: This Is The Best Career Decision You Can Possibly Make | Ryan Holiday
A couple of weeks ago, I was experimenting with Midjourney and speculating about machine creativity. This post is interesting if you haven’t tried using an AI drawing model as it talks about what Dan Hon calls ‘prompt engineering’ (a term he doesn’t like). Dan also linked to this fantastic example from Andy Baio.
I’ve spent a day playing around with it, learned some basics (like the fact that adding “artstation” to the end of your phrase automatically makes the output much better…), and generated a bunch of (even a few nice-looking) images. In other words, I was already a bit warmed up.
To add some more background, OctoSQL - an open source project I’m developing - is a CLI query tool that let’s you query multiple databases and file formats in a single SQL query. I knew for a while already that its logo should be updated, and with Dall-e arriving, I could combine the fun with the practical. Source: How I Used DALL·E 2 to Generate The Logo for OctoSQL | Jacob Martin
I listened to a great episode of CBC’s Spark podcast with the excellent Nora Young on what ownership will look like in 2050. One of the contributors talked about what it might look like to be “on the wrong side of the API”. In other words, the person responding to the request, rather than giving it.
We’re already heading towards a dystopia when people are having their behaviour influenced by black box algorithms that we don’t understand. This article talks about shopping on Instagram and listing property on Airbnb, but the point (and the anxiety) is universal.
Almost every other major Internet platform makes use of some form of algorithmic recommendation. Google Maps calculates driving routes using unspecified variables, including predicted traffic patterns and fuel efficiency, rerouting us mid-journey in ways that may be more convenient or may lead us astray. The food-delivery app Seamless front-loads menu items that it predicts you might like based on your recent ordering habits, the time of day, and what is “popular near you.” E-mail and text-message systems supply predictions for what you’re about to type. (“Got it!”) It can feel as though every app is trying to guess what you want before your brain has time to come up with its own answer, like an obnoxious party guest who finishes your sentences as you speak them. We are constantly negotiating with the pesky figure of the algorithm, unsure how we would have behaved if we’d been left to our own devices. No wonder we are made anxious. In a recent essay for Pitchfork, Jeremy D. Larson described a nagging feeling that Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations and automated playlists were draining the joy from listening to music by short-circuiting the process of organic discovery: “Even though it has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal.”
[…]
“Algorithmic anxiety,” however, is the most apt phrase I’ve found for describing the unsettling experience of navigating today’s online platforms. Shagun Jhaver, a scholar of social computing, helped define the phrase while conducting research and interviews in collaboration with Airbnb in 2018. Of fifteen hosts he spoke to, most worried about where their listings were appearing in users’ search results. They felt “uncertainty about how Airbnb algorithms work and a perceived lack of control,” Jhaver reported in a paper co-written with two Airbnb employees. One host told Jhaver, “Lots of listings that are worse than mine are in higher positions.” On top of trying to boost their rankings by repainting walls, replacing furniture, or taking more flattering photos, the hosts also developed what Jhaver called “folk theories” about how the algorithm worked. They would log on to Airbnb repeatedly throughout the day or constantly update their unit’s availability, suspecting that doing so would help get them noticed by the algorithm. Some inaccurately marked their listings as “child safe,” in the belief that it would give them a bump. (According to Jhaver, Airbnb couldn’t confirm that it had any effect.) Jhaver came to see the Airbnb hosts as workers being overseen by a computer overlord instead of human managers. In order to make a living, they had to guess what their capricious boss wanted, and the anxious guesswork may have made the system less efficient over all. Source: The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety | The New Yorker
I’m hoping other countries follow suit and bring some attention to heatwaves as human-caused extreme weather events.
Heat wave “Zoe” has brought scorching temperatures to the southern part of the country for the last few days, particularly the region of Andalusia where Seville is located. Even in the evenings, the Spanish meteorological service recorded temperatures that hovered in the mid-80s in some areas — an extra stress on the human body, which relies on cooler nights to recover from high daytime heat. Source: ‘Zoe’ becomes the world’s first named heat wave | Climatewire
I’m reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It’s an eye-opening book in many ways, and upends notions of how we see the way that people used to live.
This article suggests that 15-hour working weeks are the norm in egalitarian cultures. While working hours are steadily declining, we’re still a long way off — primarily because our desires and means are out of kilter.
The most famous of these studies dealt with the Ju/’hoansi, a society descended from a continuous line of hunter-gatherers who have been living largely isolated in southern Africa since the dawn of our species. And it turned established ideas of social evolution on their head by showing that our hunter-gatherer ancestors almost certainly did not endure “nasty, brutish and short” lives. The Ju/’hoansi were revealed to be well fed, content and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies, and by rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week had plenty of time and energy to devote to leisure.
Subsequent research produced a picture of how differently Ju/’hoansi and other small-scale forager societies organised themselves economically. It revealed, for instance, the extent to which their economy sustained societies that were at once highly individualistic and fiercely egalitarian and in which the principal redistributive mechanism was “demand sharing” — a system that gave everyone the absolute right to effectively tax anyone else of any surpluses they had. It also showed how in these societies individual attempts to either accumulate or monopolise resources or power were met with derision and ridicule.
Most importantly, though, it raised startling questions about how we organise our own economies, not least because it showed that, contrary to the assumptions about human nature that underwrite our economic institutions, foragers were neither perennially preoccupied with scarcity nor engaged in a perpetual competition for resources.
For while the problem of scarcity assumes that we are doomed to live in a Sisyphean purgatory, always working to bridge the gap between our insatiable desires and our limited means, foragers worked so little because they had few wants, which they could almost always easily satisfy. Rather than being preoccupied with scarcity, they had faith in the providence of their desert environment and in their ability to exploit this. Source: The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour week | Financial Times
This article uses the analogy of a burger chef to show how software teams can be more productive by focusing on a small number of features at a time.
I think this is more widely applicable. The factory production line was designed to make already-designed things with the fewest mistakes. It does not make people happy, nor does it foster creativity.
Figuring out problems is hard. It’s kind of what I do for a living. Having lots of different things on the go at the same time does not improve things, it makes each one worse.
Reducing transaction costs enables small batches. Small batches, in turn, reduce average cycle times, diminish risk, and enhance reliability.
You should only start without having finished when transaction costs are high, and it wouldn’t make economic sense to spend time decreasing them, either because you have agreed to a particular delivery date or because you don’t have the capital to invest.
That said, I’d be careful to avoid falling into a situation where “you’re too busy draining the flood to be able to fix the leak”. The earlier you decrease transaction costs, the earlier you’ll be reaping the benefits from having done it. Source: How finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable | Lucas F. Costa
On Saturday, my Garmin smartwatch told me that my ‘fitness age’ is now 33.5. This is eight years younger than my chronological age, and apparently as low as I can get it using the Garmin app.
This is not a surprise to me. Covid absolutely battered my lungs from January to March. So I decided to do something about it, and built up to running every single day.
Willpower is necessary to form habits, but then willpower is necessary in life in general. So yes, get a personal trainer as this guy has done. But someone shouting at you to try harder is an extrinsic motivator. What you need to do is to develop intrinsic motivation to go harder and be better.
For a long time I’ve know this to be true. During periods of consistent exercise I’ve had more energy and mental clarity throughout the day. My personal outlook on life is generally better as well. Not to mention that outdoor activities with friends are more accessible and less daunting. Despite this, it has still always been a struggle to stay consistent.
A wave of “habit fetishism” has swept through the West in recent years with books like Atomic Habits regularly topping the best seller lists. It’s a tantalising concept as it sells an easy way to “live the life you’ve always wanted”.
It may work for some, but very few people who try these techniques actually “live the life of their dreams”. What keeps fit people going to the gym on a regular basis isn’t wearing their running shoes to bed at night. It’s discipline and accountability.
This brings me to the best investment I’ve ever made: A personal trainer. Source: The best investment | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Herman’s blog
I found this article via the excellent Sentiers, which I support as a member. It discusses the importance of making visible externalities — a term which is reasonably common in literature relating to economics and risk, but not general discourse.
An externality is “an indirect cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party’s (or parties') activity”. In this case we’re talking about the cost of extracting materials from the ground and shipping them around the world.
It is vital to the relocating and offshoring of production to places where the costs are far lower. But even more importantly it makes the consequences, or ‘externalities’, of production completely invisible to Western consumers.
What if we suddenly decided that we’re going to stop pretending those things don’t happen? What if we embrace the consequences of what it means to manufacture products and to build, and to price its full cost? If the sticker price included the full cost of everything we build, then suddenly making things locally and sourcing materials locally would become much more attractive.
This is a useful article which focuses on the lack of internal Codes of Conduct and community managers within organisations. Performativity in the workplace is a thing, and workplace chat tools can escalate those types of behaviours into new levels of toxicity.
Online, everyone is engaged in a digitally-mediated performance. As Erving Goffman wrote, “We are all just actors trying to control and manage our public image.” And the pressure to maintain that image can quickly turn reasonable people into pundits. When news breaks, “there’s this feeling that if I don’t post about it on Twitter, I’m complicit,” said Charlie Warzel, co-author of Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. “You end up weighing in as if you’re some sort of public figure, despite the fact that you’re not.”
Slack emboldens the meek; compared to an all-hands, the ease of posting makes speaking up a lot easier. Anne Helen Petersen, Warzel’s partner and co-author, has found herself in that position, and sees it as a mixed blessing. The freedom is powerful, she said, “but it also opens a portal. It’s just more discourse, right?”
Leaders often treat Slack as just another tool. But as Godwin’s Law wryly observed, any extended online discussion is a Hitler comparison waiting to happen. “You’re creating a public room where people are empowered to talk back,” said Marketos. “If something starts to blow up in Slack, you need to have an amazing response that’s defensible if it’s screenshotted and shared with a reporter.” While few HR teams are experienced in rapid-response crisis communications, for community managers, “it comes naturally, and it’s very much an unsung part of their skillset.”
Source: The Extremely Online Workplace | by Benjamin Jackson
I came across this and am sharing it to remind myself of all of the ways that people try to avoid the very pressing problem of the climate emergency.
Source: Discourses of Climate Delay | Leolinne
GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft was one of the earlier adopters of the Open Badges standard. So when I saw this announcement about GitHub Achievements, I naturally assumed they’d be Open Badges.
However, I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s another staging post in the vendor lock-in long game.
I’m pleased that I completed my formal education and moved out of teaching before social media transformed the world. In this article, Marie Snyder talks about teaching an introductory Philosophy course (the subject of my first degree) and the pushback she’s had from students.
There’s a lot I could write about this which would be uninteresting, so just go and read her article. All I’ll say is that, personally, I still listen to musicians (like Morrissey) whose political views I find abhorrent. Part of diversity is diversifying your own thinking.
We have to look at ideas, not people, when sifting the wheat from the chaff. Some ideas stand the test of time even if their author is found otherwise wanting. It doesn’t suggest that they’re an honourable person when we find a piece of work worthy of our attention, and it’s not like we’re contributing to their wealth if they’re long dead. We need to bring back a nuanced approach to these works instead of the current dichotomous path of slotting people in a good or bad box. Source: On Tossing the Canon in a Cannon | 3 Quarks Daily
I don’t see this as such a weird thing, especially when it comes to food. For example, my wife follows lots of local places on Instagram and will research new places using that app when we travel. I tend to use Google Maps for that kind of thing. Neither of us would start with a regular web search, because context is important.
Even back prior to 2010, I can remember Drew Buddie doing a TeachMeet presentation on ‘Twitter is my Google’. The point is that humans are social creatures. We want recommendations and to see what we could be potentially missing out on…
Google confirmed this statistic to Insider, saying, “we face robust competition from an array of sources, including general and specialized search engines, as well as dedicated apps." Source: Nearly Half of Gen Z Prefers TikTok and Instagram Over Google Search | Business Insider
Slowly, and then all at once is how a ‘splinternet’ happens. I’m seeing more and more cases of the EU standing up to so-called Big Tech companies like Google over data processing agreements.
In this case, it’s Denmark’s data protection agency, but I should imagine other European countries might follow suit. There’ll be an uproar, though, because data security and sovereignty aside, Google absolutely nailed it with that operating system.
In a verdict published last week, Denmark’s data protection agency, Datatilsynet, revealed that data processing involving students using Google’s cloud-based Workspace software suite — which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar and Google Drive — “does not meet the requirements” of the European Union’s GDPR data privacy regulations.
Specifically, the authority found that the data processor agreement — or Google’s terms and conditions — seemingly allow for data to be transferred to other countries for the purpose of providing support, even though the data is ordinarily stored in one of Google’s EU data centers. Source: Denmark bans Chromebooks and Google Workspace in schools over data transfer risks | TechCrunch
I like the metaphor used in this post of being light a lightbulb: fully one, or off. In fact, not only have I organised my working life to be like this (I can’t work at half pace, and it’s burned me out when I’ve been employed), but this is the advice I give to my kids when they play sports.
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Naval [Ravikant] famously said: “Productivity is the Enemy of Creativity”
Rest is absolutely critical for high performance. Without it, it’s like revving your engine until it breaks or blows up. We’re in a new world now where our brains power everything. As the Doomberg crew calls it: “The Gig Economy for Brains.”
Naval again says: “Some of the most creative and productive people I have ever met work in multi-week bursts and then have weeks where they just idle with little done. It’s the nature of the human animal.”
All-in and fully energized OR quiet and at rest. There is no in between. This is a key habit for effective work in the modern day. Don’t be a dim light. Source: Be Like a Light Bulb: The Importance of Resting Ethic | The Hard Fork by Marvin Liao
John Johnston put me onto this via a comment on my personal blog. Spring ‘83 is a protocol developed by Robin Sloan, multi-talented developer, olive farm owner, and author of novels such as Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.
The internet these days is much less fun and weird than it used to be, which is sad. Here’s an example of the protocol in action at the site spring83.mozz.us and you can have a play about at The Oakland Follower Sentinel by creating your own keypair (see the blue sidebar!)
I’m dissembling a bit. The truth is, I reject Twitter, RSS, and email also because … I am hyped up to invent things!
So it came to pass that I found myself dreaming about designs that might satisfy my requirements, while also supporting new interactions, new ways of relating, new aesthetics. At the same time, I read a ton about the early days of the internet. I devoured oral histories; I dug into old protocols.
The crucial spark was RFC 865, published by the great Jon Postel in May 1983. The modern TCP/IP internet had only just come online that January, can you believe it? RFC 865 describes a Quote of the Day Protocol:
I read RFC 865, and I thought about May 1983. How the internet might have felt at that moment. Jon Postel maintained its simple DNS by hand. There was a time when, you wanted a computer to have a name on the internet, you emailed Jon.
There’s a way of thinking about, and with, the internet of that era that isn’t mere nostalgia, but rather a conjuring of the deep opportunities and excitements of this global machine. I’ll say it again. There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized.
Spring ‘83 isn’t over yet. Source: Specifying Spring ‘83 | Robin Sloan
Here in the UK, I’ve only ever heard electric vehicles make that high-pitched robotic hum at low speeds. However, it seems there was a proposal in the US for car owners to be able to set their own noise.
That turned out not to be a great idea for those who are blind or partially-sighted. It would also lead to a cacophony of noise for regularly-sighted people, to be honest…
It must have been about five years ago when we bought a Nest thermostat. Before that point, the temperature of our house would be a continuous low-level source of friction. Since then, not only has it ceased to be a point of contention, but it’s also saved us money.
This article points out that, while there are really positive benefits of reducing energy usage at scale, there are unintended side effects in terms of spikes at times when renewable energy isn’t available.
The smart thermostats are saving homeowners money, but they are also initiating peak demand throughout the network at a bad time of day, according to Cornell engineers in a forthcoming paper in Applied Energy (September 2022.)
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Lee and Zhang investigated “setpoint behavior” and learned that most homeowners use the smart thermostat’s factory-default settings. Evidence showed that residents remain confused about how to operate their thermostats and are often unable to program it, the authors said.
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While the setpoint schedules are designed to achieve the energy-saving benefit, the peak demands are concentrated primarily when renewable energy is unavailable – aggravating the peak demand by nearly 50%, according to the paper.
[…]
Without a tenable way to store energy from renewable sources like solar power, the electric utilities will be unable to supply this peak demand, which prompts fossil-fuel generators to satisfy the power load. “This can offset the greenhouse gas emissions benefit of electrification,” Lee said. Source: Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids | Cornell Chronicle
It is genuinely amazing what you can create these days with an AI model by simply inputting a few words of natural language. Craiyon (formerly DALL·E mini) allows anyone to do this right now, but there’s also previews of much more powerful models that will be available soon.
As Albert Wenger asks, what does this mean for creative people? I don’t think technology ever completely replaces but rather augments. So I think we’ll see even more artists work with AI models to create amazing things.
During my run today, I was thinking about how awesome it would be to generate running music perfectly suited to the route I was going to run. That’s entirely possible if we continue along this trajectory!
It is mind-bending to sit with this image for a while. A machine created it and did so within a space of minutes, yet it is full of imagination and detail and could easily be on the cover of a book or the walls of a museum.
So what does it mean that we now clearly and demonstrably have creative machines? Source: The Meaning of Machine Creativity | Continuations by Albert Wenger
I really like the approach of coming up with your ‘personal publishing principles’ for your website, blog, and newsletter. This is CJ Chilvers' version, which I discovered via Rebecca Toh. Below are some of my favourites from CJ’s list.
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Fail in public. Try things. Don’t be boring. See what sticks.
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Image: Cris DiNoto
Carlos Alvarez Pereira, vice president of the Club of Rome is interviewed by WIRED about a book called The Limits to Growth, published in 1972. Interestingly, he’s both critical of capitalism and confident that a cultural movement “hidden in plain sight” means that we’ll be in a better position than we are now.
I like this idea from Cory Doctorow, but monopolies tend to like exploiting their monopoly position. Still, it might be a way for Amazon to get around being scrutinised closely by regulators?
I always enjoy Ian Bogost’s articles for The Atlantic as they’re thought-provoking. In this one, he talks about how ‘hybrid work’ is doomed, mainly because The Office is a construct, a way of organising life and work, and heavily invested in the status quo.
Even in the technology sector, where the tools of remote work are manufactured, the Office reigns supreme. Before the pandemic, Big Tech companies doubled down on the sorts of work environments that had been common for almost a century: urban high-rises and suburban office parks. (Think of Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington; Google’s and Facebook’s in Silicon Valley; Apple’s spaceship in Cupertino; and the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.) Their deluxe office amenities—free food, gymnasiums, medical care, etc.—only underscore this point: The tech industry has a deep investment in the most conservative interpretation of office life.
If the companies that design and build the very foundations for remote work still adhere to the old-fashioned values of the Office, what should we expect from all the rest? It’s still possible that hybridized knowledge work will become the norm, with work-from-home days provided as a perk. But to get there, office workers must organize, and take the goals and power of the Office into account. It does not want to be flexible, and it cares little for efficiency. If the Office makes concessions, they will be minor, or they will take time; hybrid work is not a revolution.
This is a heart-rending article by Maria Farrell, who suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She details her experiences for Long Covid suffers, and it’s not easy reading.
I’m including this quotation mainly because she talks about the impact of the Tory government in the UK over the last decade or so. It’s easy to forget that things didn’t use to be like this
It’s a very bourgeois thing to be able to hide out in grad school. I’m always embarrassed when people remark on how many degrees I have. It put me into financial penury for quite a few years, but it felt worth it to still outwardly look like a person who was moving forward in life, not someone whose clock had stopped in August 1998 when I failed to heal from glandular fever. All that is harder now in Britain, as Tories systematically steam open the institutional creases people like me could fold ourselves into, and dismantle the social welfare that would have held many others as they waited to be well. I started off with moderate M.E. and now, much of the time, I would say it is mild. Source: Settling in for the long haul | Crooked Timber
This is a heart-rending article by Maria Farrell, who suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She details her experiences for Long Covid suffers, and it’s not easy reading.
I’m including this quotation mainly because she talks about the impact of the Tory government in the UK over the last decade or so. It’s easy to forget that things didn’t use to be like this
It’s a very bourgeois thing to be able to hide out in grad school. I’m always embarrassed when people remark on how many degrees I have. It put me into financial penury for quite a few years, but it felt worth it to still outwardly look like a person who was moving forward in life, not someone whose clock had stopped in August 1998 when I failed to heal from glandular fever. All that is harder now in Britain, as Tories systematically steam open the institutional creases people like me could fold ourselves into, and dismantle the social welfare that would have held many others as they waited to be well. I started off with moderate M.E. and now, much of the time, I would say it is mild. Source: Settling in for the long haul | Crooked Timber
Rebecca Toh is not only a fantastic photographer, but also has a wonderful turn of phrase.
Rebecca Toh is not only a fantastic photographer, but also has a wonderful turn of phrase.
Cory Doctorow: activist, technologist, sci-fi writer and all-round awesome human being has written a powerful article for Locus magazine. He likens the climate emergency to us being collectively trapped on a bus that’s speeding towards a cliff edge.
We’ll all die at the bottom of the canyon, but no-one will yank the wheel, as it would cause the bus to roll and many people to be hurt.
The good news is: climate denial is on the wane. The bad news is: deniers have pivoted to incrementalism: “We’ll fix the climate. Give us a couple decades to phase out oil and gas. Give us a couple decades to replace the cars and retrofit the houses. Give us a couple decades to invent cool direct-air carbon capture systems, or hydrogen cars that work just like gas cars, or to replace our overland aviation routes with high speed rail, or to increase our urban density and swap out cars for subways and buses. Give us a couple decades to keep making money. We’ll get there.”
In other words: “We’re pretty sure we can get some wings on this bus before it goes over the cliff. Keep your hands off the wheel. Someone could get really badly hurt.”
People are already getting really badly hurt, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re poised to break through key planetary boundaries – loss of biosphere diversity, ocean acidification, land poisoning – whose damage will be global, profound and sustained. Once we rupture these boundaries, we have no idea how to repair them. None of our current technologies will suffice, nor will any of the technologies we think we know how to make or might know how to make. Source: Cory Doctorow: The Swerve | Locus Online
The author of this article helps out with computer museums around the world. He talks about how its not just nostalgia which fuels them, but learning about the technological and social context in which the hardware were situated.
He then explains that future historians won’t have much of that context because of DRM, IP laws, and encryption.
How was Facebook used by students in the 2010s? We cannot show you, that version of Facebook is not hosted anywhere.
What correspondence did Vint Cerf have as president of the ACM with other luminaries of computing industry and research? We do not know; Google will not publish his emails.
What was it like playing Angry Birds on an iPhone 3G? We do not know; Apple is no longer distributing signed receipts for that binary.
What did the British cabinet discuss when they first learned of the Coronavirus pandemic? We do not know; they chatted on a private WhatsApp group.
What books were published analysing the aftermath of the Maidan coup in Ukraine? We do not know; we do not have the keys for the Digital Editions DRM. How was the coup covered in televised news? We do not know; the broadcasters used RealVideo and Windows Media Encoder and we cannot read those files. Source: The Digital Dark Ages | De Programmatica Ipsum
Like most people, it would seem, I’m sensitive to criticism. Not just that, but even the absence of praise can be problematic. It’s something I’m working on, but this article pointing out that criticism being more connected to the person making the comments than the one receiving them, is helpful.
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While a focus on the darker side of the world around us may sound like a depressing prospect, it has helped humans overcome everything from natural disasters to plagues and wars by being better prepared to deal with them (although there is evidence that optimism can also help to protect us from the stress of extreme situations). The human brain evolved to protect our bodies and keep us alive, and has three warning systems to deal with new dangers. There’s the ancient basal ganglia system that controls our fight or flight response, the limbic system which triggers emotions in response to threats to help us understand dangers, and the more modern pre-frontal cortex, which enables us to think logically in the face of threats.
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In some cases, negative remarks from people we love can lead to long-lasting mental wounds and resentment that can cause relationships to break down. Researchers at the University of Kentucky in the US found relationships are seldom saved when partners ignore relationship problems to remain “passively loyal”. “It is not so much the good, constructive things that partners do or do not do for one another that determines whether a relationship works as it is the destructive things that they do or not do in reaction to problems,” they said.
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“We are all sensitive to negative comments in the sense that there are no ‘stronger’ personality traits. Considering the fact that everyone receives negative comments can help us deal with them … and could be a good strategy to protect our own mental health,” she adds. “Another useful strategy could be to consider that comments are more connected to the person who’s making them than the one who’s receiving them." Source: Why criticism lasts longer than praise | BBC Future
Colin Percival is the founder of Tarsnap which is a somewhat-niche cryptographically-secure backup solution. In this post, he replies to a comment he saw that he’s potentially wasting his life on something less important than the world’s biggest problems.
His point, I think, is that starting your own business is the only way these days of being able to do the kind of deep work which people like him find fulfilling. So I guess the question is whether there’s an even better way of structuring society to enable even greater contribution?
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In many ways, starting my own company has given me the sort of freedom which academics aspire to. Sure, I have customers to assist, servers to manage (not that they need much management), and business accounting to do; but professors equally have classes to teach, students to supervise, and committees to attend. When it comes to research, I can follow my interests without regard to the whims of granting agencies and tenure and promotion committees: I can do work like scrypt, which is now widely known but languished in obscurity for several years after I published it; and equally I can do work like kivaloo, which has been essentially ignored for close to a decade, with no sign of that ever changing.
[…]
Is there a hypothetical world where I would be an academic working on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture right now? Sure. It’s probably a world where high-flying students are given, upon graduation, some sort of “mini-Genius Grant”. If I had been awarded a five-year $62,500/year grant with the sole condition of “do research”, I would almost certainly have persevered in academia and — despite working on the more interesting but longer-term questions — have had enough publications after those five years to obtain a continuing academic position. But that’s not how granting agencies work; they give out one or two year awards, with the understanding that those who are successful will apply for more funding later. Source: On the use of a life | Daemonic Dispatches
This is an insightful and enjoyable article about something which I’ve noticed even at my level of gaming. For example, when quickly explaining the controls for Sniper Elite 4 to someone recently, I realised they were almost exactly the same as Red Dead Redemption 2.
That ‘legibility’ is a double-edged sword. It allows players to switch between games quickly and easily, but perhaps mitigates against innovation, experimentation, and getting really deep into a game…
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Said differently, games are forced to be legible to players. This isn’t a call for radical experimentalism but to simply state that the cost to make games (due to a large amount of factors) is steadily increasing, and as such there is a proportionally growing interest by the powers that be that those games turn a profit. With little flex on things like price (proposing games should cost $70, $80, or more leads to general uproar, despite being something that should totally happen), games are forced to internalize this economic burden on the process of production itself.
[…]
It’s here that I introduce the title of this article, something that sounds more thinky than it is - “Game Design Mimetics”. If the role of mechanics design in a game is to best serve the content of the game, be legible to the player, and not introduce too much uncertainty into the middle of a production, the simplest answer to “what should we do about the design” is to just “copy what already works”.
[…]
The past here isn’t looked at as the past, but instead as the metric by which to hold directly against considerations for the present. The constant backwards facing view as the rubric by which to create the future acts as a collapsing mechanism for possibility. Source: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened To Game Design?) | k-hole
I found myself using the phrase “the night is darkest before dawn” today. This post from Anne-Marie Scott is certainly an example of that, and I too look forward to a world beyond “today’s dogpile of an internet”.
I used to think there was no chance of the current system of capital-based society ending within my lifetime.
But now? I’m not so sure. I see influential writers I respect like Seth Godin and (in this case) Warren Ellis talk openly about the harms of capitalism.
And given the crypto collapse following the pandemic perhaps people are slowly coming to realise there’s more to life than money…
Image: Jorge Salvador
Amazing. Look at how perfectly this creature was preserved in the permafrost!
I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing as the permafrosts melt due to the climate crisis.
Zazula thinks Nun cho ga was probably about 30 to 35 days old when she died. Based on the geology of the site, Zazula believes she died between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago.
“So she died during the last ice age and found in permafrost,” said Zazula. Source: ‘She’s perfect and she’s beautiful’: Frozen baby woolly mammoth discovered in Yukon gold fields | CBC News
If you’re at the top of the Ponzi scheme pyramid, you have a vested interest in keeping it going…
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Another article about Brexit, after one last week. I think Brexit was a form of economic suicide, but over the weekend I’ve been thinking about the wider perspective.
Not only did we have a huge worldwide economic crash around 15 years ago, but everyone came online with their smartphones around the same time. So we’ve had a lot of revelations and a lot of resetting to do. Perhaps all of this is the tumultuous times before a new form of society?
One can only hope. Britain is going to be screwed no matter what, because we’re disconnected from our main trading and cultural partners.
I definitely feel this at the moment. As a parent, your kids mostly follow what you do rather than what you say, which confers quite a bit of a responsibility about how you choose to live your life…
[…]
Adulthood means taking on more responsibilities, and in turn, receiving more privileges. Unless we do something worthwhile — fun, interesting, desirable — with those privileges, young people won’t want to apply to the society of grown-ups, and adults won’t be able to wholeheartedly encourage them to join its ranks. Source: Sunday Firesides: We Need to Make Adulthood More Desirable | The Art of Manliness
Image: Henri Pham
There’s a lot going on in this article, which I’ve taken plenty of quotations from below. It’s worth taking some time over, especially if you haven’t read Thinking, Fast & Slow (or it’s been a while since you did!)
Till this point the fundamental purpose of software was to support the user’s objectives. Somewhere, someone decided the purpose of users is to support the firm’s objectives. This shift permeates through the Internet. It’s why basic software is subscription-led. It’s why there’s little functional difference between Windows’ telemetry and spyware. It’s why leaving social media is so hard.
Like chronological timelines, users grew to expect these patterns. Non-commercial platforms adopted them because users expect them. While not as optimized as their commercial counterparts, inherited anti-patterns can lead to inherited behaviours.
[…]
In his book Thinking Fast And Slow, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman describes two systems of thought…
[…]
System 1 appears to prioritise speed over accuracy, which makes sense for Lion-scale problems. System 1 even cheats to avoid using System 2. When faced with a difficult question, System 1 can substitute it and answer a simpler one. When someone responds to a point that was never made that could be a System 1 substitution.
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10 Years ago my life was extremely online. I’ve been the asshole so many times I can’t even count. Was I an asshole? Sure, but the exploitation of mental state in public spaces has a role to play. It’s a strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
Commercial platforms are filled with traps, some inherited, many homegrown. Wrapping it in Zuck’s latest bullshit won’t lead to change. Even without inherited dark patterns, behaviours become ingrained. Platforms designed to avoid these patterns need to consider this if exposed to the Dark Forest.
For everything else it’s becoming easier to just stay away. There are so many private and semi-private spaces far from the madding crowd. You just need to look. I did. I lost followers, but made friends. Source: Escaping The Web’s Dark Forest | by Steve Lord
The UK is a pretty bad place to live at the moment. Except for the US, and well a lot of other places. I guess what I’m saying is that things are pretty bad politically and in terms of economically, but then the rest of the world is pretty screwed as well.
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The Sunday Surfers (a name my group of friends give to ourselves when playing PlayStation) came across an abandoned moonshine still in the game Red Dead Redemption 2 last weekend. That possibly primed my brain to find this random article even more interesting than I did already!
I’m a big fan of GNOME as well. Although configurability is important, starting from a basis of opinionated design leads to better results, I think.
[…]
I keep coming back to Gnome and it never ceases to amaze how quickly I can start being productive in it. That’s what a desktop is supposed to do, get out of your way as much as possible while providing great features to facilitate that. It’s very much opinionated about its design and experience, but you shouldn’t fight it. Learn to embrace Gnome for what it is, a beautiful, if somewhat different desktop for developers and regular users alike. Source: Gnome, the opinionated desktop environment | Dušan’s blog
Sion Whellens helped us set up WAO six years ago, and he’s quoted in this piece about a new worker co-op federation.
There’s been a feeling for a while that Coops UK only really represents large co-operatives such as food co-ops. So this new organisation, of which we will be a member, should be much better at giving worker-owned co-ops a voice.
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The new federation is starting out small – there are around 400 worker co-ops in the UK – but is receiving support and guidance from other federations worldwide, including the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. “USFWC is a relatively new organisation that has managed to pull together something that works really effectively with little core resource in terms of membership subscriptions. They don’t have a vast amount of rich work co-ops to fund it, so they have to pull resources together in different ways. We can learn from that,” says Mr Whellens.
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Co-operatives UK has been a home for worker co-ops for 20 years, but Mr Whellens believes that over the last decade, there has been “a growing realisation that it can’t really speak about worker co-operation authentically, or develop the worker co-op-specific resources we really need”.
[…]
“There has been a progressive loss of a distinctive voice and service for worker co-ops and we reached a point where we realised we need an independent voice and an independent network that can be more agile, less bureaucratic, more focused on the primary audience for worker co-operation – which is workers.” Source: New federation planned for worker co-ops in the UK | Co-operative News
This is incredible. I want to see it!
The white concrete, as a common urban construction material, suggests the pale corpse of the lost city, while the textures and fissures marking the presence and memory of the old city reveal the futility of erasing and moving forward on a psycho-geographic tabula rasa. Altogether, the Cretto di Burri beautifully responds to a moment of profound cultural grief through its pared-down, yet highly suggestive form and materiality. Source: The Psycho-Geography of the Cretto di Burri | ArchDaily
We didn’t have time to go and see the bay with lots of abandoned hotels near Dubrovnik when we were in Croatia recently. But there’s definitely something fascinating about faded glamour and abandoned places.
This is spectacularly simple advice from Derek Sivers. I immediately used the approach after reading this article for a script I was writing for a screencast and it really helped!
New sentence? Hit [Enter]. New line.
Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for your eyes only. HTML or Markdown combine separate lines into one paragraph. Source: writing one sentence per line | Derek Sivers
There’s some good tips about travelling light and the kind of gear to buy, which trade-offs, to make, etc. in this guide. Interestingly, it’s from one of the founders of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin. I’m not sure what I think of him, to be honest, but this guide is useful, nevertheless.
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As a point of high-level organization, notice the bag-inside-a-bag structure. I have a T-shirt bag, an underwear bag, a sock bag, a toiletries bag, a dirty-laundry bag, a medicine bag, a laptop bag, and various small bags inside the inner compartment of my backpack, which all fit into a 40-liter Hynes Eagle backpack. This structure makes it easy to keep things organized.
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As you might have noticed, a key ingredient in making this work is to be a USBC maximalist. You should strive to ensure that every single thing you buy is USBC-friendly. Your laptop, your phone, your toothbrush, everything. This ensures that you don’t need to carry any extra equipment beyond one charger and 1-2 charging cables. In the last ~3 years, it has become much easier to live the USBC maximalist life; enjoy it! Source: My 40-liter backpack travel guide
I ended up cancelling my Verso books subscription because I was overwhelmed with the number of amazing books coming out every month. This looks like one to keep an eye out for.
But if you ask people today, for all those positive attributes, they’re also likely to tell you that the internet has several big problems. The new Brandeisian movement calling to “break up Big Tech” will say that the problem is monopolization and the power that major tech companies have accrued as a result. Other activists may frame the problem as the ability of companies or the state to use the new tools offered by this digital infrastructure to intrude on our privacy or restrict our ability to freely express ourselves. Depending on how the problem is defined, a series of reforms are presented that claim to rein in those undesirable actions and get companies to embrace a more ethical digital capitalism.
There’s certainly some truth to the claims of these activists, and aspects of their proposed reforms could make an important difference to our online experiences. But in his new book ‘Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future’, Ben Tarnoff argues that those criticisms fail to identify the true problem with the internet. Monopolization, surveillance, and any number of other issues are the product of a much deeper flaw in the system.
“The root is simple,” writes Tarnoff: “The internet is broken because the internet is a business.” Source: The Privatized Internet Has Failed Us | Jacobin
This is absolutely wild.
For three years, the priests would eat a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another three years and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the urushi tree, normally used to lacquer bowls. This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids, and—most importantly—it killed off any maggots that might cause the body to decay after death. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, wherein he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day, he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed. Source: Sokushinbutsu of Dainichibou Temple | Atlas Obscura
This is a humorous article, but one with a point.
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The greatest trick America’s ever pulled on the subjects of its various vassal states is making us feel like a participant in its grand experiment. After all, our fate is bound to the American empire’s whale fall. My generation in particular is the first pure batch of Yankee-Yobbo mutoids: as much Hank Hill as we are Hills Hoist (look it up!), as familiar with the Supreme Court Justices as we are with the judges on Master Chef, as comfortable in Frasier’s Seattle or Seinfeld’s Upper West Side as we are in Ramsay Street or Summer Bay.
[…]
I should not know who Pete Buttigieg is. In a just world, the name Bari Weiss would mean as much to me as Nordic runes. This goes for people who actually might read Nordic runes too. No Swede deserves to be burdened with this knowledge. No Brazilian should have to regularly encounter the phrase “Dimes Square.” To the rest of the vast and varied world, My Pillow Guy and Papa John should be NPCs from a Nintendo DS Zelda title, not men of flesh and bone, pillow and pizza. Ted Cruz should be the name of an Italian pornstar in a Love Boat porn parody. Instead, I’m cursed to know that he is a senator from Texas who once stood next to a butter sculpture of a dairy cow and declared that his daughter’s first words were “I like butter.” Source: I Should Be Able to Mute America | Gawker
This is a humorous article, but one with a point.
[…]
The greatest trick America’s ever pulled on the subjects of its various vassal states is making us feel like a participant in its grand experiment. After all, our fate is bound to the American empire’s whale fall. My generation in particular is the first pure batch of Yankee-Yobbo mutoids: as much Hank Hill as we are Hills Hoist (look it up!), as familiar with the Supreme Court Justices as we are with the judges on Master Chef, as comfortable in Frasier’s Seattle or Seinfeld’s Upper West Side as we are in Ramsay Street or Summer Bay.
[…]
I should not know who Pete Buttigieg is. In a just world, the name Bari Weiss would mean as much to me as Nordic runes. This goes for people who actually might read Nordic runes too. No Swede deserves to be burdened with this knowledge. No Brazilian should have to regularly encounter the phrase “Dimes Square.” To the rest of the vast and varied world, My Pillow Guy and Papa John should be NPCs from a Nintendo DS Zelda title, not men of flesh and bone, pillow and pizza. Ted Cruz should be the name of an Italian pornstar in a Love Boat porn parody. Instead, I’m cursed to know that he is a senator from Texas who once stood next to a butter sculpture of a dairy cow and declared that his daughter’s first words were “I like butter.” Source: I Should Be Able to Mute America | Gawker
This is a useful article in terms of thinking about the problems we have around misinformation online. Yes, we have a responsibility to be informed citizens, but there are structural issues which are actively working against that.
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This view places the primary responsibility for our current informational predicament – and the responsibility to mend it – on individuals. It views them as somehow cognitively deficient. An attractive aspect of this view is that it suggests a solution (people need to become smarter) directly where the problem seems to lie (people are not smart). Simply, if we want to stop the spread of misinformation, people need to take responsibility to think better and learn how to stop spreading it. A closer philosophical and social scientific look at issues of responsibility with regard to information suggests that this view is mistaken on several accounts.
[…]
Even if there was a mass willingness to accept accountability, or if a responsibility could be articulated without blaming citizens, there is no guarantee that citizens would be successful in actually practising their responsibility to be informed. As I said, even the best intentions are often manipulated. Critical thinking, rationality and identifying the correct experts are extremely difficult things to practise effectively on their own, much less in warped information environments. This is not to say that people’s intentions are universally good, but that even sincere, well-meaning efforts do not necessarily have desirable outcomes. This speaks against proposing a greater individual responsibility for misinformation, because, if even the best intentions can be corrupted, then there isn’t a great chance of success.
[…]
Leaning away from individual responsibility means that the burden should be shifted to those who have structural control over our information environments. Solutions to our misinformation epidemic are effective when they are structural and address the problem at its roots. In the case of online misinformation, we should understand that technology giants aim at creating profit over creating public democratic goods. If disinformation can be made to be profitable, we should not expect those who profit to self-regulate and adopt a responsibility toward information by default. Placing accountability and responsibility on technology companies but also on government, regulatory bodies, traditional media and political parties by democratic means is a good first step to foster information environments that encourage good knowledge practices. This step provides a realistic distribution of both causal and effective remedial responsibility for our misinformation problem without nihilistically throwing out the entire concept of responsibility – which we should never do.
The interesting thing about this article is the predictions from forecasters on the website Metaculus. There’s wisdom in crowds, and particularly those who have interest/expertise in a given area.
There are a million philosophical questions about ‘living forever’ or just humans living for a lot longer than they do now. This article, however, just focuses on the four most promising ways, and their likelihood over different timescales.
I’m not talking figuratively here. You, reading this, might have an eternal life. Source: The 4 Ways You Might Live Forever | Tomas Pueyo
I love it when people who are great at what they do, and who sweat the details, share their processes. It’s well worth looking at the lengths this designer has gone to in order to make tapping a simple checkbox feel like an achievement. Visuals, sound, haptics, the lot!
These things matter. One of the reasons I like Trello so much, for example, is the confetti that emanates from the card when you drag it to ‘done’.
Design can be reductive and rational. But it can also add richness to our lives.
Maximize that.
And use every tool you can get your hands on. Source: The World’s Most Satisfying Checkbox | (Not Boring) Software
I’ve done a lot of writing for work this week and needed to hear some of the things in this post by Justin Murphy. Great stuff.
Finding the will to click the publish button is a battle against yourself, against your own feeling that it’s not worth it.
You feel nervous about what your readers will think, but that makes no sense. They subscribed to you because they want to know what you think; you have zero reason to care what they think. If you really care what your readers think, then go subscribe to them. You are not subscribed to your readers because you do not care what they think. Now act like it. Source: Writing is a Single-Player Game | Other Life
We had a conversation earlier this week about how we’re going to measure the progress of some community work we’re doing. In the end, we decided that there were no metrics that would make sense. It’s a vibe.
This post says much the same thing. Sometimes there are no objective measurements for things that matter. And that’s OK.
You can instead choose to just fly visually. It’s easier, it’s safer, and it’ll get you where you’re trying to go. The thing is, your entire industry thinks it’s impossible, and worse, they think it is irresponsible. They’re kinda right. You have to be good at the innate skill of flying, instead of the skill of navigating by instrument. Guess which one the “become a manager in tech” system produces. Bonus points: recognize how that is itself a PIO.
Bonus Bonus Bonus points: Consider that if you’ve learned the skillset of visual flight poorly, and you don’t use the instruments to correct yourself, how will you ever know it’s going wrong in time?
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What matters for your team/org’s success is the fundamental human relationships, comradery, esprit de corps, support and space-curation, and especially, all of the prior while treating-em-like-adults. Those things make up the totality of why people want to work on your team and are excited about working with and supporting their peers. These are not invisible things. These are things you can pay attention to, structurally. These are not things you can quantify with numbers. You’re going to have to get comfortable with forming, expressing, and defending opinions based on things besides “data.” Not because you don’t have data, but because you don’t have quantifiable numbers that represent themselves, and our industry is poisoned into believing that only such things are data. We’ve got thousands of years of evolution helping us understand how group dynamics are flowing. Yes, using that is a skill set. That’s my point. Build and use that skill set. Learn how to read people’s reactions. Learn how to understand people’s motivations. Learn how to see how people work in groups and as individuals. Do the work. Source: How to build orgs that achieve your goals, by absolutely never doing that | Graham says wrong things
Image: Jp Valery
Sadly, EdTech, the field that I used to feel part of, is never going to change, so this post from Audrey Watters was sadly inevitable. Anything that can be commodified will be commodified, it would seem.
Thanks Audrey, you’re awesome. I hope you find solace and energy in what you decide to do next.
I didn’t send out a Thought Shrapnel newsletter at the end of May as I’d hardly posted here during the month. There was no particular reason I could fathom for this. I guess I just got stuck in a rut of not-writing-here.
As David Cain points out in this post, ruts are often of our own creation and happen when we relate to a ‘dip’ in mood, luck, or progress. Happily, I’m back posting here and I’m in the opposite of a rut when it comes to exercise!
What I’ve noticed about my ruts is that they are mostly my own creation. Something external precipitates them, and something internal sustains them. Bad luck and bad weather are unavoidable, but a long rut can begin, and persist, even when the bad weather itself only lasted a day.
My theory is that ruts are what happen when you experience a dip – in mood, in luck, in progress – and you respond to it in a certain very human way: by doing something that makes you more prone to such dips. A simple example is the common sleep-caffeine spiral. You have a bad sleep for some reason (there was a party next door, or you saw a mouse in the cellar) and the next day you feel tired, and when you feel tired you sometimes have an afternoon coffee. This makes you more prone to more bad sleeps, which makes you more prone to afternoon coffees, and so on. You responded to the dip by doing something that creates more dips. All of this feels perfectly natural as it is happening.
Parenting is the hardest job I have ever had. It never stops, and I seldom think I’m doing a good job at it.
That’s why it can be comforting to see ‘scientific studies’ indicate that it doesn’t really matter how you parent, in the long-run. The trouble is, as this article shows, that’s not actually true.
More evidence comes from the grim events of death and divorce. If your parent dies while you are very young, you end up less like that parent, in terms of education, than otherwise. Again, that can’t be genetics. And children of parents who divorce become more like the parent they stay with. In other words, when parents spend time with their children, their behaviours and values rub off.
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The bottom line is this: how much and what you say to your child from their first few days literally carves new paths in their brain. We know this from research on speech development. When mothers responded to their babies’ cues with the most basic vocalisations, they accelerated their children’s language development. So go ahead and babble along with your toddler. Source: No wait stop it matters how you raise your kids | Wyclif’s Dust
I’m composing this having done about 19 paid hours of work this week. I’ve also contributed to Open Source projects, written here, done some housework, parenting, and various other things.
I don’t define myself by paid work. I can’t really even properly tell you what I ‘do’ for a ‘job’, to be honest.
According to Bertrand Russell, this is all well and good. As Andrew Curry notes in this post, we should be aiming for about 60% capacity at any given time. I usually end up averaging between 20 and 25 hours per week, so it looks like I’m doing OK…
Running with significant slack is often more efficient than running systems at high capacity. If you’re mathematically minded, Erik Bern simulates this via some code in the queueing theory link above, but G Gordon Worley III…gives a simpler explanation:
This property will hold for basically anything that looks sufficiently like a distributed system. Thus the “operate at 60% capacity” rule of thumb will maximize throughput in lots of scenarios: assembly lines, service-oriented architecture software, coordinated work within any organization, an individual’s work, and perhaps most surprisingly an individual’s mind-body.
“Slack” is a decent way of putting this, but we can be pretty precise and say you need ~40% slack to optimize throughput: more and you tip into being “lazy”, less and you become “overworked". Allowing flexibility and time into our systems so that we can sit idle is not an admission of defeat, but instead has the potential to be optimal in many circumstances.
I’m not sure how many working hours a week the dogma “operate at 60% capacity” translates to, but Bertrand Russell thought it might be twenty. Source: 10 June 2022. Work | Dystopia | Just Two Things
I love this post by David Cain so much. He talks about how every weekend during the summer he goes on a bike ride. Using an app to randomise his destination, he always finds something worth discovering. Why? Because he’s in what he calls ‘art gallery mode’.
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The first time it sent me to a creekside clearing, where I saw a strange black glob in the water that turned out to be a mass of tadpoles. Another time it sent me to a gravel back lane near where I used to live, at a spot where someone had written “DAD!” on the fence in some kind of white resin. Another day it took me to a book-exchange box containing only children’s books and Stephen King’s Tommyknockers.
Wherever it sends you, there’s always something there that seems charged with a small amount of cosmic significance, even if it’s just a particularly charismatic patch of dappled sunlight, an abandoned shopping list with unusual items on it, or some other superordinary sight akin to the twirling plastic bag in American Beauty.
The trick here is that there’s always something significant, poignant, or poetic everywhere you look, if your mind is in that certain mode – so rare for adults — of just looking at what’s there, without reflexively evaluating or explaining the scene. A mystery co-ordinate in an unfamiliar neighborhood gives you few preconceptions about what you’re going to find there, so the mind naturally flips into this receptive, curious state that’s so natural for children.
I sometimes call this state “art gallery mode,” because of a trick I learned from an art history major. We were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, browsing famous abstract paintings by Pollock, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and other artists whose swirls, rectangles, and blobs are regarded as masterpieces.
We’re already at the stage where most people in the developed world have a device that can access the internet in their pocket. Many families have multiple devices in their house that can access the internet. We’re getting to the stage where that’s starting to be the case in developing countries.
So the new digital divide? How we use the internet. I think there’s a lot to unpack here, especially as we live in unequal societies dominated by hyper-capitalism. It would be easy to victim blame, but I know from experience that when I’m burned out, all I want to do is stare and scroll at my phone…
Getting online in the 1990s required a personal computer and an account with a service provider, and e-commerce transactions required a credit card and bank account. As our economy was becoming increasingly digital, major new inequalities were now arising because so many around the world could neither afford a PC or an internet account and had no bank relationship or credit card. The reach and connectivity we were all so excited about in this initial phase of the internet era was in reality not so inclusive. While the internet was truly empowering for those with the means to use it, it led to a growing digital divide both within countries and across the world. The internet was ushering a global digital revolution, but it was disconcerting to have a global digital revolution that left out the majority of the world’s population.
This picture started to change in the 2000s. Continuing technology advances were now bringing the empowerment benefits of the digital revolution to a majority of the planet’s population. Mobile phones and wireless internet access went from a luxury to a necessity that most everyone could now afford, initially in advanced economies, and later in most of the rest of the world. We were transitioning from the connected economy of PCs, browsers and web servers to an increasingly hyperconnected digital economy of ubiquitous, powerful and inexpensive mobile devices, cloud-based apps, and broadband wireless networks.
While the original internet access gap is now minimal in developed economies, Moro and his collaborators found that a digital usage gap has now emerged, representing the distinct uses of the internet by different socio-economic groups based primarily on their income and educational status.
[…]
The study found quantitative evidence of a significant digital divide in internet usage between two socio-economic groups, each with different income and educational attainment. In principle, all individuals had access to the same internet. But, the study found that each group generally accessed its own distinct version of the internet, and their socio-economic behavior was thus influenced by the fairly different services and information that they were exposed to. By analyzing mobile traffic flows, the study identified the key services that each group accessed:
Image source: Robin Worrall
It would be easy to dismiss this as the musings of a small company before they get to scale. However, what I like about it is that the three things they suggest for software developers (look inward, look away from your screen, cede control to the individual) actually constitute very good advice.
If we’ve learned anything, it’s that all numerical metrics will be gamed, and that by default these numbers lack soul. After all, a life well-lived means something a little different to almost everyone. So it seems a little funny that the software we use almost every waking hour has the same predetermined goals for all of us in mind.
In the end, we decided that we didn’t want to optimize for numbers at all. We wanted to optimize for feelings.
While this may seem idealistic at best or naive at worst, the truth is that we already know how to do this. The most profound craftsmanship in our world across art, design, and media has long revolved around feelings.
[…]
You see — if software is to have soul, it must feel more like the world around it. Which is the biggest clue of all that feeling is what’s missing from today’s software. Because the value of the tools, objects, and artworks that we as humans have surrounded ourselves with for thousands of years goes so far beyond their functionality. In many ways, their primary value might often come from how they make us feel by triggering a memory, helping us carry on a tradition, stimulating our senses, or just creating a moment of peace. Source: Optimizing For Feelings | The Browser Company
I’ve got this thought about how every good idea becomes colonised and domesticated. While domestication can be a good thing, because it potentially makes it more accessible to all, it also robs the idea of its radical, transformatory power.
Colonisation, however, is never a positive thing. It’s about renegotiating existing relationships, often through the lens of power, capital, and hegemonic power.
How related the above two paragraphs are to this article in The New Yorker is questionable. But, to me, it’s related. Centralised social media is colonised and domesticated.
“Clickbait” has long been the term for misleading, shallow online articles that exist only to sell ads. But on today’s Internet the term could describe content across every field, from the unmarked ads on an influencer’s Instagram page to pseudonymous pop music designed to game the Spotify algorithm. Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work. Where “cultural capital” describes how particular tastes and reference points confer status, “content capital” connotes an aptitude for creating the kind of ancillary content that the Internet feeds upon. Since so much audience attention is funnelled through social media, the most direct path to success is to cultivate a large digital following. “Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend considerable time producing (or paying someone else to produce) content about themselves and their work,” Eichhorn writes. Pop stars log their daily routines on TikTok. Journalists spout banal opinions on Twitter. The best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur posts reels and photos of her typewritten poems. All are trapped by the daily pressure to produce ancillary content—memes, selfies, shitposts—to fill an endless void. Source: How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines | The New Yorker
I already work what most people would call ‘part-time’, doing no more than 25 paid hours of work per week, on average. I’m glad that employers are experimenting with a shorter workweek (for the same pay) but inevitably one of the metrics will be ‘productivity’ which I think is a ridiculously difficult thing to actually measure…
It’s good to read this, which is a side product of the excellent Just One Thing podcast.
I currently drink a couple of cups of coffee per (working) day — one at around 10:00 and the other at about 14:30. Given I often exercise in the middle of the day, this actually works out pretty well!
One way that coffee boosts performance is by blocking the action of adenosine. Adenosine is a chemical messenger in your brain which makes you feel tired. Caffeine blocks the action of adenosine, helping you go on for longer without getting tired. “You could do worse than imagining adenosine to be like a brake that’s going to slow down your neural activity. Caffeine essentially hits the same receptors to prevent sleepiness,” explains Prof Betts.
Another way coffee works to boost exercise performance is by raising your levels of adrenaline, which can reduce pain and delay fatigue. It could also have effects on your fat and muscles. Source: Can coffee make you fitter? | BBC Radio 4 - Just One Thing
I have to say that tracking my time is the worst thing about consulting rather than being employed. I don’t feel the urge to work at all hours of the day, but I resent ‘accounting’ financially for my time.
And while the “billable hour” can be a psychological trap, it does teach us one valuable lesson: there is a distinction between working and not working. It’s a distinction worth sustaining. Source: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling | Tim Harford
*AFK = ‘Away From Keyboard’
I used AIM and MSN Messenger as a teenager, from around 1996 to about 2001. It was great, and I remember messaging with friends and the woman who is now my wife using it.
Part of the whole experience of it was that you were using the service on a shared device, a computer that the rest of the family would use. In that sense, it was more like a text-based landline phone. It wasn’t personal like the smart devices that live in our pockets these days.
There a lot of nostalgia about how things used to be, and we’re certainly not going back to shared devices as a primary means of getting online anytime soon. So that means that we need other ways of respecting one another’s boundaries. This is something we can actually reclaim ourselves by responding to messages on our own terms.
I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away. But this is about Away Messages themselves—the bits of code that constructed Maginot Lines around our availability. An Away Message was a text box full of possibilities, a mini-MySpace profile or a Facebook status update years before either existed. It was also a boundary: An Away Message not only popped up as a response after someone IM’d you, it was wholly visible to that person b they IM’d you.
Nothing like this exists in our modern messaging apps.
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People send too many messages. I send too many messages. The first step in making messaging amends is to admit that you, too, are an inconsiderate messaging maniac.
But I’ll never stop, and neither will you. Quick messaging is a utility. It is, in many cases, the most efficient and meaningful form of communication we have. It’s crucial for relationship building, for organizing, for supporting others through hard times. It can be joyful.
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Incredible. I highly recommend clicking through to watch the videos!
This is from WIRED magazine in 1997 where authors Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden suggest ten scenarios that could play out in the 21st century. On the one hand, this feels eerily prescient given our current world. On the other hand, perhaps the writing has been on the wall for quite a while.
We’re recording an episode of the Tao of WAO podcast tomorrow with futurist Bryan Alexander, who pretty much predicted the pandemic in his book Academia Next. I wonder what his thoughts are on this?
Source: In 1997, Wired Magazine Predicts 10 Things That Could Go Wrong in the 21st Century: “An Uncontrollable Plague,” Climate Crisis, Russia Becomes a Kleptocracy & More | Open Culture
I’m reading a book which deals with the Protestant Reformation at the moment. I think for anyone who knows some history, there have been times which have truly been unprecedented; things have changed so quickly that people haven’t been able to keep up.
We’re living during a slow, but accelerating, car crash. We do need to update our mental models, for sure. But collectively, and most important at levels which are going to have an impact. Let’s not forget that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions.
But this is not a stable society, and today gardening is not enough.
We grew up in societies built upon certain assumptions about how the world works, and how the planet around us should be seen. We now know those assumptions were wrong in profound ways, and in one human lifetime we have altered the climate and biosphere, squandered vast natural riches and destabilized a myriad of systems we depend on. We have made the circumstances of our lives discontinuous with everything that came before us. The societies we live in are now catastrophically unsuited for the planet we’ve made. Yet we still see the planet around us with worldviews formed inside of those societies.
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Seeing with fresh eyes is something we can learn to do. It offers real advantages. At very least, an updated worldview means being able to stand in the surf and face the ocean, to see the waves rolling in, giving us a better shot at not getting plowed and dragged when the next sleeper wave suddenly surges up and hits us.
[…]
Right now, rebuilding our worldviews involves a lot of labor-intensive personal exploration. Being native to now demands finding insight, not just receiving it. It demands teaching ourselves how to learn new things, when both the course of our study and the lessons to be absorbed are complex and constantly evolving. This is a real challenge when we have such busy lives. A lot of people will decide to worry about it later.
[…]
The greatest danger in any work that asks you to think systemically about the future is getting locked into the worldview that made sense to you when you first began, that you built your successful career on.
We all have limited time and energy. Building up an insightful mental model of how the world works takes a lot of both. The pay-off is in the profit and sense of purpose gained from one’s expertise. It is very common, when you’re highly rewarded for a given set of working insights, to commit more to those insights as your career unfolds, to begin even to defend those insights from challenging new perspectives (ones you fear might devalue your intellectual stock in trade). This “sunk-cost expertise” can easily become a set of shackles.
[…]
All this is to say that the very process of worldview-building is undergoing an unprecedented shift. The planetary crisis is swallowing the world we thought we knew, whole, in one great gulp. Source: Old thinking will break your brain. | Alex Steffen
I like the way that Warren Ellis works out loud. I’ve read some great books because of this, and learned a lot about developing your own style.
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[T]his place should be a repository of all the things that interest me and teach me, under the general rubric of storytelling, culture and knowledge work. That’s the focus. This is a tool. That means, among other things, that I need to get better at deep linking back into the archive of the site. This is one thing that social media trained us out of. If you’ve been around a while, tumblelogs kind of did that to us too.
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Modifier: “evolving the tools” becomes its own rabbit hole. Just learn the habit of putting stuff where you can fucking find it later, Warren. Source: LTD Development | WARREN ELLIS LTD
We booked a holiday to France this week and used Tesco vouchers to pay for the Eurotunnel crossing. These Tesco vouchers are a kind of payment-in-kind for the data they gather (and presumably sell) about our grocery purchases.
I use both Google Pay and Garmin Pay so that I don’t have to take a wallet with me everywhere. It’s convenient, but these two tech companies — as well as my bank — know a lot about my purchasing habits.
So, from that point of view, it seems odd to wring our hands about the State knowing more about grocery purchases. But the point, I guess, is that in this case there’s no way to escape it, no opt-out.
Because everything about an individual living in Norway is linked to their fødselnummer (birth number), SSB already knows where you live, what you earn and what’s on your criminal record.
However, according to a report by NRK, they now want to know where you shop, and what you buy.
SSB has ordered Norway’s major supermarket chains NorgesGruppen, Coop, Bunnpris and Rema 1000 to share all their receipt data with the agency. Nets, the payment processor that is responsible for 80% of transactions, will also need to provide data.
[…]
SSB claims they want a less time-consuming way of collecting and analysing household consumption statistics in order to inform tax policy, social assistance and child allowance.
[…]
SSB is adamant that they are only concerned with statistics at a group level: “When the purchases are linked to a household, it will be possible in the consumption statistics to analyze socio-economic and regional differences in consumption, and link it to variables such as income, education and place of residence.” Source: Norway to Track All Supermarket Purchases | Life in Norway
We booked a holiday to France this week and used Tesco vouchers to pay for the Eurotunnel crossing. These Tesco vouchers are a kind of payment-in-kind for the data they gather (and presumably sell) about our grocery purchases.
I use both Google Pay and Garmin Pay so that I don’t have to take a wallet with me everywhere. It’s convenient, but these two tech companies — as well as my bank — know a lot about my purchasing habits.
So, from that point of view, it seems odd to wring our hands about the State knowing more about grocery purchases. But the point, I guess, is that in this case there’s no way to escape it, no opt-out.
Because everything about an individual living in Norway is linked to their fødselnummer (birth number), SSB already knows where you live, what you earn and what’s on your criminal record.
However, according to a report by NRK, they now want to know where you shop, and what you buy.
SSB has ordered Norway’s major supermarket chains NorgesGruppen, Coop, Bunnpris and Rema 1000 to share all their receipt data with the agency. Nets, the payment processor that is responsible for 80% of transactions, will also need to provide data.
[…]
SSB claims they want a less time-consuming way of collecting and analysing household consumption statistics in order to inform tax policy, social assistance and child allowance.
[…]
SSB is adamant that they are only concerned with statistics at a group level: “When the purchases are linked to a household, it will be possible in the consumption statistics to analyze socio-economic and regional differences in consumption, and link it to variables such as income, education and place of residence.” Source: Norway to Track All Supermarket Purchases | Life in Norway
My own Linux journey has gone from Red Hat Linux, to Ubuntu, to Pop!_OS. However, today I’ve been messing about with Fedora Silverblue. I’m actually typing this on ChromeOS, which of course is also Linux.
What I like about The Register is their snarky, sarcastic style, which they put to good use in this article.
It is also a comment under pretty much every Reg article on Linux that there are too many to choose from and that it’s impossible to know which one to try. So we thought we’d simplify things for you by listing how and in which ways the different options suck. Source: The cynic’s guide to desktop Linux | The Register
My own Linux journey has gone from Red Hat Linux, to Ubuntu, to Pop!_OS. However, today I’ve been messing about with Fedora Silverblue. I’m actually typing this on ChromeOS, which of course is also Linux.
What I like about The Register is their snarky, sarcastic style, which they put to good use in this article.
It is also a comment under pretty much every Reg article on Linux that there are too many to choose from and that it’s impossible to know which one to try. So we thought we’d simplify things for you by listing how and in which ways the different options suck. Source: The cynic’s guide to desktop Linux | The Register
It’s Jubilee weekend in the UK, not that I’m celebrating. Someone re-shared this classic article in The Irish Times from last year which expresses just the entire ridiculousness of venerating a talentless inbred family.
After walking Hadrian’s Wall (84 miles, 72 hours) a couple of months ago, I’m now seriously considering walking The Pennine Way (268 miles) next year. I reckon it might take a couple of weeks, as I absolutely beasted myself to do Hadrian’s Wall so quickly.
After walking Hadrian’s Wall (84 miles, 72 hours) a couple of months ago, I’m now seriously considering walking The Pennine Way (268 miles) next year. I reckon it might take a couple of weeks, as I absolutely beasted myself to do Hadrian’s Wall so quickly.
In Andrew Curry’s latest missive, his ‘two things’ are Climate and Business. The diagram below is actually from the latter section, but I think it’s actually also very relevant for the former.
He argues—following the work of Jens Rasmussen—that successful businesses operate in a safe space that sits between economic failure, on one side, lack of safety, on another, and overload, on a third. Source: 4 May 2022. Climate | Business - Just Two Things
Once you start recognising colour schemes and sound effects, every new film ends up looking and sounding the same.
Yes, I’m getting old, but as Adam Mastroianni from Experimental History explains, there’s shifts happening in everything from books to video games.
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Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention. Finding them takes some foraging and digging, and then you’ll have to stomach some very odd, unfamiliar flavors. That’s good. Learning to like unfamiliar things is one of the noblest human pursuits; it builds our empathy for unfamiliar people. And it kindles that delicate, precious fire inside us––without it, we might as well be algorithms. Humankind does not live on bread alone, nor can our spirits long survive on a diet of reruns. Source: Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly | Experimental History
The Financial Times has a free-to-play game where the aim is to try and keep global warming to only 1.5°C by the year 2100. There are different things to choose from and decisions to make.
I only managed to keep it to 1.88°C and still had to make some pretty drastic decisions. We’re utterly screwed. We need to act on the climate crisis, but also start adapting too.
(also worth looking at the article on how they made this)
This is from six years ago but it’s worth revisiting as I don’t think it’s too much of a push to see these elements at play in the USA right now. Which, if you think about the role that country played up until recently, is staggering.
Fascism and authoritarianism change over time, however, and so it’s worth also listening to a recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed programme on ‘Strongmen’. For example, instead of banning elections, fascists/authoritarian allow the democratic veneer to remain, they just ensure that the result goes they way they want.
There’s been a noticeable influx of people to the Fediverse over the last few days due to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
What I find really interesting are three things:
I listen to music. A lot. In fact, I’m listening while I write this (Busker Flow by Kofi Stone). This absolutely rinses my phone battery unless it’s plugged in, or if I’m playing via one of the smart speakers in every room of our house.
I’ve considered buying a dedicated digital media player, specifically one of the Sony Walkman series. But even the reasonably-priced ones are almost the cost of a smartphone and, well, I carry my phone everywhere.
It’s interesting, therefore, to see Warren Ellis' newsletter shoutout being responded to by Marc Weidenbaum. It seems they both have dedicated ‘music’ screens on their smartphones. Personally, I use an Android launcher that makes that impracticle. Also, I tend to switch between only four apps: Spotify (I’ve been a paid subscriber for 13 years now), Auxio (for MP3s), BBC Sounds (for radio/podcasts), and AntennaPod (for other podcasts). I don’t use ‘widgets’ other than the player in the notifications bar, if that counts.
Source: Central Listening Device | Disquiet
I have degrees in Philosophy, History, and Education. As such, I have received what most would call a ‘liberal education’.
These days, people don’t put as much store in a liberal education as they used to, which is a shame. In fact, many people don’t even know what it means. SMBC explains.
My first response to this article was ‘why?’ My second was realising that this in no way is ‘living forever’. Utterly pointless.
“Literally, if I die—and I have this data collected—people can come or my kids, they can come in, and they can have a conversation with my avatar, with my movements, with my voice,” he told me. “You will meet the person. And you would maybe for the first 10 minutes while talking to that person, you would not know that it’s actually AI. That’s the goal.”
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But even with all the ethical preparation and experience the company can muster, there will be inevitable and justifiable ethical questions about allowing a version of a self to continue on in perpetuity. What if, for example, the children of a deceased Somnium Space user found it painful to know he was continuing on in some form in their metaverse? Source: Metaverse Company to Offer Immortality Through ‘Live Forever’ Mode | Vice
In a startling example of the Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, the incumbent advertising giants are actually being strengthened by legislation aimed to curb their influence. Because, of course.
The rise of this tracking has implications for digital advertising, which has depended on user data to know where to aim promotions. It tilts the playing field toward large digital ecosystems such as Google, Snap, TikTok, Amazon and Pinterest, which have millions of their own users and have amassed information on them. Smaller brands have to turn to those platforms if they want to advertise to find new customers. Source: How You’re Still Being Tracked on the Internet | The New York Times
A great blog post by Chris Trottier about actually doing something about the problems with centralised social media, by refusing to be a part of it any more.
As an aside, once you see the problem with capitalism mediating every human relationship and interest, you can’t un-see it. For example, I’m extremely hostile to advertising. I really can’t stand it these days.
Acceptance is no small thing. If you’ve spent years on a social network, investing in relationships, it’s hard to accept that all that effort was a waste. I’m not talking about the people you build friendships with, but the companies and services that connect you. Twitter and Facebook are the nuclear ooze of the Internet, and nothing’s going to make them better.
It’s time to let go. Toxic social media doesn’t care about you, it just wants to exploit you. To them, you’re inventory, a blip in a database.
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Getting rid of toxic social media is about building a future without it. There’s thousands of developers working on an open web, all who are dedicated to building a better Internet. Still, if we want those walled gardens to be dismantled, we must let developers know it’s worth while to code an alternative.
When I first stepped into the world of consulting, I spent around 18 months working with a large organisation. The person I reported to in the organisation did all of his real work in the evenings, because his 9-5 day was completely full of meetings.
Talking in meetings isn’t work. I’ve never thought so, and never will.
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This morning, I finished reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the translated name of Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel, published a decade later in English.
I thought I’d share my five of the sections I highlighted, because it’s one of those books that, despite being a work of fiction, also has sections which describe well the human condition.
(I’ll also note that the book has made me more militantly vegetarian, which I didn’t see coming!)
A couple of years ago I would have said that this analogy of an atom bomb being exploded over our information ecosystem is a bit extreme. Not now.
I really liked this article by Simon Sarris about what we grasp for versus what we get in domestic settings. I’m definitely receptive to the emotional (and even spiritual) aspects of our build environment at the moment, for some reason.
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Intimacy is not clutter, but the proper demarcation of space. To lure back enchantment, we must learn to create the nook, to appreciate the wilder garden, to consider the power of shadows and small spaces, to welcome living materials over insensate ones. There is no formula that can easily arrive at intimacy, only a sensitivity to context that can be cultivated. If we look beyond the economic and utilitarian world, we will find a secret one waiting for us. Source: Patina and Intimacy | Simon Sarris
One of the downsides of getting older is that things you took to be sacred all of a sudden seem to be obsolete. For example, music albums, which have always been a part of my life, seem to now be referred to in the past tense?
There’s a whole Wikipedia article on the ‘album era’ so… it must be true.
I think the realisation that it’s impossible to ‘keep up’ (whatever that means) with even a subset of an industry these days may be the key to enlightenment.
One of the great things for me about Thought Shrapnel is that I can bookmark things I’d potentially go back and read. Then, if I do get the chance, I can share them here. It sounds like Ellis is doing something similar with his site.
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I think I have only about eighty sites in my RSS reader these days, which generally generate some 150 new posts to read through. I should post an updated RSS list so I can see for myself.
My inputs used to be twenty times that, and constant from when I woke up to when I finally slept. That thing when you wake up with a shudder and reach for the phone because you’re behind the moment. But I suspect it took a pandemic and serial lockdowns for me to understand that, even when I was feeling good, it was like a motion detector alarm was going off in my head every second for eighteen hours a day. And you get so trained to it that when the alarms drop to just once every sixty seconds, you go looking for more input to bring the rate back up. I’ve been working hard to get past that Source: Morning Routine and Work Day, Spring 2022 | WARREN ELLIS LTD
Image: Jon Tyson
Tyler Freeman wrote a script to analyse the tweets he’s shown in his algorithmic Twitter timeline. 90% of his friends (i.e. the people he chose to follow) never made it to the main feed.
The diagram below shows the 90% in grey, withthe people he follows in orange, strangers are in blue, and ads are pink. This is what happens when you have software with shareholders.
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The way I see it, the centralized path via government regulation is a short-term fix which may be necessary given the amount of power our current societal structures allot to social media corporations, but the long-term fix is to put the power into the hands of each user instead—especially considering that centralized power structures are how we got into this mess in the first place. I’m eager to see what this new world of decentralization will bring us, and how it could afford us more agency in how we donate our attention and how we manage our privacy. Source: Does Twitter’s Algorithm Hate Your Friends? | Nightingale
I love Red Dead Redemption 2, and it’s great that the stunning vistas and scenery in the game is recognised.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with this document. It’s just not very exciting. Maybe that’s OK.
The Internet itself is low-level infrastructure — a connective backbone upon which other things are built. It’s essential that this backbone remains healthy, but it’s also not enough. People don’t experience the Internet directly. Rather, they experience it through the technology, products, and ecosystems built on top of it. The most important such system is the Web, which is by far the largest open communication system ever built.
This document describes our vision for the Web and how we intend to pursue that vision. We don’t have all the answers today, and we expect this vision to evolve over time as we identify new challenges and opportunities. We welcome collaboration — both in realizing this vision, and in expanding it in service of our mission. Source: Mozilla’s vision for the evolution of the Web
Wow, who knew how difficult it was to be a criminal? Found via HN.
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Disinformation is critical to your continued freedom. Give barium meat tests to your contacts liberally. It doesn’t matter if they realize they’re being tested. Make sure that if you’re caught making small talk, you inject false details about yourself and your life. You don’t want to be like Ernest Lehmitz, a German spy during World War II who sent otherwise boring letters about himself containing hidden writing about ship movements. He got caught because the non-secret portion of his letters gave up various minor personal details the FBI correlated and used to find him after intercepting just 12 letters. Spreading disinformation about yourself takes time, but after a while the tapestry of deceptions will practically weave itself.
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Take-away: If you rely only on tor to protect yourself, you’re going to get owned and people like me are going to laugh at you. Remember that someone out there is always watching, and know when to walk away. Do try to stay safe while breaking the law. In the words of Sam Spade, “Success to crime!" Source: So, you want to be a darknet drug lord… | nachash
The monarchy wasn’t a force for good during the age of colonialism/empire, nor is it a force for good now.
This live map of electricity production and consumption is really interesting, on a number of levels. First, it’s great that it exists! It really helps show, for example, that Poland needs to get its act together.
But also, design decisions matter. For example, the focus on carbon, while important, obscures the fact that nuclear might help get us out of the current mess but is really storing up problems for future generations.
At the weekend I visited the Moco Museum with my wife in Amsterdam. It’s the first time I’ve seen an NFT art exhibition. It wasn’t… bad? But, as someone commented when I said as much on social media, the ownership model is kind of irrelevant. It’s the digital art that matters.
(the animation below is from a video I took of an appropriate Beeple artwork)
What I think we’re all starting to realise is that for everything to be on the blockchain, we would need to fundamentally change the nature of human interaction. And that change would be toward dystopia.
In this article, James Grimmelmann, who is a professor at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech (where he directs the Cornell Tech Research Lab in Applied Law and Technology) explains just this.
By default, buying an NFT “of” one of these three things doesn’t give you possession of them. Getting an NFT representing a tungsten cube doesn’t magically move the cube to your house. It’s still somewhere else in the world. If you want NFTs to actually control ownership of anything besides themselves, you need the legal system to back them up and say that whoever holds the NFT actually owns the thing.
Right now, the legal system doesn’t work that way. Transfer of an NFT doesn’t give you any legal rights in the thing. That’s not how IP and property work. Lawyers who know IP and property law are in pretty strong agreement on this.
It’s possible to imagine systems that would tie legal ownership to possession of an NFT. But they’re (1) not what most current NFTs do, (2) technically ambitious to the point of absurdity, and (3) profoundly dystopian. To see why, suppose we had a system that made the NFT on a blockchain legally authoritative for ownership of a copyright, or of an original object, etc. There would still be the enforcement problem of getting everyone to respect the owner’s rights. Grimmelmann clarifies in a footnote that just because NFTs might work for art, doesn’t mean they’re appropriate for… well, anything else:
Cory Doctorow quite rightly calls out that Big Tech’s “too big to fail” status has created “oligopolistic power” which limits our choice over how we’re connected to the people we want to interact with.
I like his reference of Frank Pasquale’s two approaches to regulation. I guess I’m a Jeffersonian, too…
One of the things that defines a community are its speech norms. In the online world, moderators enforce those “house rules” by labeling or deleting rule-breaking speech, and by cautioning or removing users.
Doing this job well is hard even when the moderator is close to the community and understands its rules. It’s much harder when the moderator is a low-waged employee following company policy at a frenzied pace. Then it’s impossible to do well and consistently.
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It’s not that we value the glorious free speech of our harassers, nor that we want our views “fact-checked” or de-monetized by unaccountable third parties, nor that we want copyright filters banishing the videos we love, nor that we want juvenile sensationalism rammed into our eyeballs or controversial opinions buried at the bottom of an impossibly deep algorithmically sorted pile.
We tolerate all of that because the platforms have taken hostages: the people we love, the communities we care about, and the customers we rely upon. Breaking up with the platform means breaking up with those people.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The internet was designed on protocols, not platforms: the principle of running lots of different, interconnected services, each with its own “house rules” based on its own norms and goals. These services could connect to one another, but they could also block one another, allowing communities to isolate themselves from adversaries who wished to harm or disrupt their fellowship.
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Frank Pasquale’s Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem poses two different approaches to tech regulation: “Hamiltonians” and “Jeffersonians” (the paper was published in 2018, and these were extremely zeitgeisty labels!).
Hamiltonians favor “improving the regulation of leading firms rather than breaking them up,” while Jeffersonians argue that the “very concentration (of power, patents, and profits) in megafirms” is itself a problem, making them both unaccountable and dangerous.
That’s where we land. We think that technology users shouldn’t have to wait for Big Tech platform owners to have a moment of enlightenment that leads to its moral reform, and we understand that the road to external regulation is long and rocky, thanks to the oligopolistic power of cash-swollen, too-big-to-fail tech giants. Source: To Make Social Media Work Better, Make It Fail Better | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Noah Smith makes a good point in this article that ‘cancel culture’ has always existed, we just called it ‘social ostracism’. The difference is the technology we interact with, and the intended and unintended audiences with which we communicate.
The internet also makes it much less hard to maintain private spaces because text can be screenshotted and distributed widely. In the old days, if you said something that would be cancel-worthy outside the group of people you were talking to, it was impossible for someone to verifiably transmit that information outside the group — they could snitch on you, but it would be hearsay and you could deny it. But when you write something down, the text of what you wrote can be screenshotted and distributed widely to people that you didn’t expect to be watching you.
Now, this broad distribution has a number of effects. It makes it a lot harder to get together with your buddies in private and say racist or sexist stuff, because now one of them can betray you with a screenshot. Lots of people are probably pleased with that outcome.
But it also means that everyone who talks on the internet must always worry about their words being shown to someone who’s going to interpret it in an uncharitable way.
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Thus, the internet changes Cancel Culture by massively increasing the number of people who can target you for ostracism. It’s a bit like living in a gossipy small town where you don’t know any of your neighbors — you don’t know who’s going to read what you write, so you don’t know how people are going to take what you say. Source: It’s not Cancel Culture, it’s Cancel Technology | Noahpinion
This is a wide-ranging and somewhat jumbled article which nevertheless has at its core a key point about the decline in trust in society. That’s not just a ‘vibe shift’ but a more permanent and worrying state of affairs.
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It’s difficult to imagine how trust in national governments can be repaired. This is not, on the face of it, apocalyptic. The lights are on and the trains run on time, for the most part. But civic trust, the stuff of nation-building, believing that governments are capable of improving one’s life, seems to have dimmed. Source: What You’re Feeling Isn’t A Vibe Shift. It’s Permanent Change. | BuzzFeed News
I heard from a former colleague that they’d been ‘autoblocked’ on Twitter for responding snarkily to someone. I don’t have an account there any more, so had to look up what they meant.
This kind of algorithmic blocking is the exact opposite of what you’d want from a platform that genuinely cared about human, community-focused interaction. We need to avoid this kind of approach with the Bonfire Zappa project.
It’s the unaccountability of it that gets me. The algorithm is a black box.
Some things to know about autoblock
Given the news that both the Arctic and Antarctic are currently a lot warmer than expected, this is interesting news. Sea levels 170 metres higher than normal would mean that my house would be underwater…
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The work also suggests that the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere were higher than expected during the mid-Cretaceous period, 115-80 million years ago, challenging climate models of the period.
The mid-Cretaceous was the heyday of the dinosaurs but was also the warmest period in the past 140 million years, with temperatures in the tropics as high as 35 degrees Celsius and sea level 170 metres higher than today.
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They found that the annual mean air temperature was around 12 degrees Celsius; roughly two degrees warmer than the mean temperature in Germany today. Average summer temperatures were around 19 degrees Celsius; water temperatures in the rivers and swamps reached up to 20 degrees; and the amount and intensity of rainfall in West Antarctica were similar to those in today’s Wales. Source: Traces of ancient rainforest in Antarctica point to a warmer prehistoric world | Imperial News | Imperial College London
Very cool. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
In this interview with Andrew Dana Hudson, he lays out a brief overview of the five futures he discusses in his book. This, in turn, is based on his Masters thesis.
There’s a lot of optimism in solarpunk approaches to the future, which is attractive. We just need to have the will to realise that it’s not already over.
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Solarpunk also seems to me a bridge toward a future of energy abundance. It’s funny, given how much solarpunk is (wonderfully) influenced by crusty degrowthers and permacultural downshifters, but it’s possible that if we keep building renewables the way we’re projected to over the next decade or so, we might end up with access to way more energy than human beings have ever had to work with (at least during the day). What do we do with that? Those electrons have to go somewhere. Well, we’ll need a lot of energy to remove a Lake Michigan’s worth of carbon out of the atmosphere, in order to stabilize the climate and roll back ocean acidification. Call that Big Chemistry. But probably there’s room for Big Computation and Big Culture as well. If solar energy becomes cheaper than free, how does that broaden our artistic ambitions? And what does that sometimes-post-scarcity mindset mean for how we treat each other? Source: Our Shared Storm: An Interview with Andrew Dana Hudson – Solarpunk Magazine
A few weeks ago, I linked to Nesta’s predictions for 2022. One of them, climate inactivism, is a form of nihilism and helplessness I also see in relation to the current war in Ukraine.
The historian in me knows that nothing is inevitable. But it’s hard to feel that one has any ability to shape or contribute to things that require aligned geopolitical will — especially while slowly crawling out of a pandemic bunker.
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From the point of view of a barnacle, the whole of the ocean seems to rise and fall. Stand long enough before the tides and eventually you’ll see the erosion of the shore. But what are the tides from inside the ocean? The erosion of one beach leads to its deposition elsewhere. What is decline but the birth of something new?
The cult of decline worships a tautology, a cognitive bias, a bank run. If you believe things are failing, then you won’t expend the energy necessary to sustain them, and they will fail. In a universe like ours, dominated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, some creative vitality is necessary to sustain anything, even a good mood.
The Roman Empire didn’t succumb to insurmountable tidal forces. There was no tsunami of decrepitude that wiped it away. Everything it faced at the end—wars, barbarians, epidemics—was something it had conquered at least twice before. The difference was that its people no longer cared enough to overcome them. They believed it was over, and so it was. Source: Thankfully, Everything is Doomed | Rick Wayne
The glossy Instagram lifestyle is actually led by a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the world’s population. Instead of us all elbowing each other out of the way in pursuit of that, this article points to a better solution: co-operation.
Call the first “the top-up.” It’s the economics of competition and asymmetrical knowledge and shareholder value and creative destruction. It’s the dominant system. We know all about the top-up. Tales of the doings of the top-up economy are mainlined into our brains from business articles, financial analysis, stories about our planet’s richest people or corporations or nations. Bezos. Buffett. Gates. Musk. Zuckerberg. The Forbes 400. The Fortune 500. The Nasdaq. The Nikkei. On and on.
Call the second “the bottom-down.” We don’t hear as much about it because it’s a lot less sexy and a lot more sticky. It involves survival mechanisms and community solidarity and cash-in-hand calculations.
But it’s the economic system of the global majority, and this makes it the more important of the two.
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The top-up economic sphere functions like a gated community in which people who have money can pretend that everything they do and have in life is based on merit, and that the communal and cooperative boosts from which they profit are nothing but natural outgrowths of that merit.
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Change always comes from below — and it is in the bottom-down relationships where growth and egalitarianism can flourish. Every volunteer fire department is a community platform. Every mutually managed water system demonstrates that neighbors can build things when they need each other. Every community-based childcare network or parent-teacher association is a nascent collective. Every civic association, neighborhood or church council, social action network or food pantry gives people a broader perspective. Every collectively run savings and credit association demonstrates that communal trust can give people a leg up. Source: Co-ops And Community Challenge Capitalism | Noema
It’s fascinating to think that children’s stories may have been told and re-told across languages and cultures for millennia. It just goes to show the power of narrative structure!
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Tehrani says that the successful fairy tales may persist because they’re “minimally counterintuitive narratives.” That means they all contain some cognitively dissonant elements—like fantastic creatures or magic—but are mostly easy to comprehend. Beauty and the Beast, for example, contains a man who has been magically transformed into a hideous creature, but it also tells a simple story about family, romance, and not judging people based on appearance. The fantasy makes these tales stand out, but the ordinary elements make them easy to understand and remember. This combination of strange, but not too strange, Tehrani says, may be the key to their persistence across millennia. Source: Some fairy tales may be 6000 years old | AAAS
Hacker News isn’t just a great resource for tech-related news. The ‘Ask HN’ threads can also be a wonderful source of information or just provide different ways of thinking about the world.
In this example, the top-voted answer to a question about weight loss had me thinking about gut bacteria ‘craving’ sugar. Weird, but a useful framing.
This article in Aeon was published at around the same time as I published a post on my personal blog about time as a human construct. In that post, I talked about the French Republican calendar and the link between it and the weather.
What’s interesting in this article is that the author, David Henkin, a history professor, talks about the success of the week as being because it’s not attached to religious, cultural, or climatological norms.
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The modern week has superimposed upon the ancient week a rhythm that is fundamentally social, incorporating an awareness of the demands and constraints of other people. Yet the modern week is also somewhat individualised, inasmuch as its rhythms are shaped by all sorts of private decisions we make, especially as consumers. Whereas Sabbath counts and astrological dominions subject everyone to the same schedule, the modern week makes us aware of our relationship to our networks and to the habits of others, while simultaneously highlighting the variety of our networks and the contingency of those habits. Source: How we came to depend on the week despite its artificiality | Aeon
Instagram has never been a place I’ve ever wanted to spend any time or attention. But its impact on physical spaces is undeniable.
This post (newsletter issue?) by Drew Austin cites a couple of other authors who perfectly skewer the Instagram aesthetic as being a grammar that quickly conveys that somebody… did a thing.
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Affirming the interchangeability of “millennial” and “Instragrammable” as descriptors, Fischer pinpoints the force that really drives them: Instagrammable “does not mean ‘beautiful’ or even quite ‘photogenic’; it means something more like ‘readable.’ The viewer could scroll past an image and still grasp its meaning, e.g., ‘I saw fireworks,’ ‘I am on vacation,’ or ‘I have friends.’” If Instagram as a medium demands readability, in other words, it puts pressure on the physical environment to simplify itself accordingly, at least in the long run. Source: #178: I Can See It (But I Can’t Feel It) | Kneeling Bus
I’m not sure where I came across this, but Ian Nesbitt is undertaking a modern pilgrimage on a recently-uncovered medieval route from Southampton to Canterbury.
He talks about the ‘inner journey’ as well as the actual one-foot-in-front-of-another journey. Sounds interesting, so I’ve added his blog to my feed reader.
Oliver Burkeman on Jocelyn K. Glei’s Hurrry Slowly is an absolute treat. In particular, he quotes Jim Benson on how we can easily become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations”. I also liked the discussion around the “internalised capitalism” of “clock time”.
The title comes from an important point that Burkeman makes about so many of our hopes and dreams being based on somehow in the future being a radically different person to who we are now.
It reminded me of a section in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel in which he summarises Seneca by saying that the problem about going somewhere to escape things is that you always take yourself (and your mental/emotional baggage) with you…
Like many people in a relationship, I have a persistent backchannel with my wife. I have never used WhatsApp, and so we ended up using Telegram. After reading this article from the EFF, an organisation I donate to on a monthly basis, we’ve switched to Signal.
My wife’s family moved to Signal after one of the privacy debacles around data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook. Many people I know have switched from Telegram to Matrix for group chat.
So the only people left on Telegram that I contact regularly are my parents, my sister, and a few random people I probably haven’t messaged for a while…
If you do not have [Telegram’s] secret chat turned on, your chat communications can be exposed or seen just like channels and groups. If you do turn on secret chat, then Telegram cannot see the contents of your communication, but they still have access to metadata about the communications, including who you talked to and when you talked to them. It may be possible to draw very specific conclusions about what you are doing based only on the metadata about your conversation. Source: Telegram Harm Reduction for Users in Russia and Ukraine | Electronic Frontier Foundation
No-one who’s been paying attention should be in the last surprised that AI-synthesized faces are now so good. However, we should probably be a bit concerned that research seems to suggest that they seem to be rated as “more trustworthy” than real human faces.
The recommendations by researchers for “incorporating robust watermarks into the image and video synthesis networks” are kind of ridiculous to enforce in practice, so we need to ensure that we’re ready for the onslaught of deepfakes.
This is likely to have significant consequences by the end of this year at the latest, with everything that’s happening in the world at the moment…
It’s funny that the author of this article uses Reddit’s app as an example of the problems with infinite scroll, as it’s the app I’ve most recently deleted on my phone. I installed it because I had to in order to continue reading a particular subreddit that I needed access to, but then the front page is just, so interesting for easily-distracted people (i.e. all of us) that I had delete it a few days later.
As a parent, there are some apps I don’t allow my kids to access at all, and other ones I kind of tolerate if they access them through the browser. The combination of notifications and infinite scroll is a dangerous drug for the mind.
[…]
I don’t have any quick fixes or easy answers. I’ve struggled with this for a very long time. I’ve gotten much better at dealing with it, but I find I have to remain conscious of it. That’s where admitting defeat helps; I know how my brain works, and I can work with it. Let’s not install that app with the infinite scroll, since we can probably get by with just the mobile web version. Let’s not log in, unless there’s a reason you need to, since they’re after you with recommendations for your account. Let’s try to be conscious of how much time you end up spending on certain sites. Source: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll | Caffeinspiration
Sociocracy, which includes consent-based decision making, is something we use at WAO. I’ve written about it several times on my personal blog as well as here.
It looks like the approach is working not just for yogurt-knitting vegans who work in co-operatives, but hard-nose businesses like Xero. Who knew?
So I decided to introduce consent-based decision making to the leadership team. It’s something that a colleague introduced me to last year. It’s had such a positive impact on my work that I thought I’d share more about it, in the hope that you can use this simple technique in your team as well. Source: Making better, faster decisions that are good enough for now | Bonnie Slater
I had the pleasure of interviewing Georgia Bullen, Executive Director of Simply Secure yesterday. I noticed that her website links to an active RSS feed from her Instapaper account, which I immediately added to my feed reader.
My first gleaning from that feed came today, when I came across this clever website which not just explains, but shows how to make writing more readable. Highly recommended.
Audrey Watters is turning her large brain to the topic of “wellness” and, in this first article, talks about mis/disinformation. This is obviously front of mind for me given my involvement in user research for the Zappa project from Bonfire.
David Cain took three days offline. It sounds like something that wouldn’t have been amazing 15 years ago, but these days goes straight to the front page of Hacker News.
I can understand why it’s weird to live in the hybrid world of being middle-aged and being alive before everything and everyone was online. But the big thing we need to do is to help the next generations understand that there is an offline world which is rich and worthwhile.
While I only deleted my Twitter account at the end of last year, it’s been about 12 years since I deleted my Facebook one. As Cory Doctorow points out, it’s a terrible organisation that no-one should work for, and whose products no-one should use.
Facebook was already paying a wage premium, offering sweeteners to in-demand workers in exchange for checking their consciences at the door. Those sweeteners mostly took the form of shares, which means that all those morally flexible “Metamates” got a hefty pay-cut when the company’s stock price fell off a cliff. Expect a lot of them to leave – and expect the company to have to pay even more to replace them. Companies with falling share prices can’t use share grants to attract workers.
Facebook is now famously trying to pivot (ugh) to virtual reality to save itself. It’s an expensive gambit. It’s going to alienate a lot of its users. It’s going to alienate a lot of its in-demand workers. It’s going to freak out a lot of regulators.
Meanwhile, the switching costs for people who want to jump ship keep getting lower. It’s not merely that fewer and fewer of the people you want to talk with are still on Facebook. Even if there’s someone whose virtual company you can’t bear to part with, lawmakers in the US and Europe are working on legislation that would force Facebook to allow third parties to “federate” new services with it. That would mean that you could quit Facebook and join an upstart rival – say, one by a privacy-respecting nonprofit or even a user-owned co-op – and still exchange messages with the communities, customers and family you left behind on Facebook’s sinking ship. Source: I’ve been waiting 15 years for Facebook to die. I’m more hopeful than ever | The Guardian
I am thankful every working day that I set up a co-operative with friends and former colleagues so that while I’m in control of my own destiny, I also have awesome people to work alongside.
Well, you still have a boss. It’s you. And you might not be a good one. Freelancers spend part of their day doing the work, and the rest of the time earning better clients. Source: Common pitfalls and myths of the new economy | Seth’s Blog
I think common sense would suggest that copyright should only apply to human-created works. But the line between what human brains and artificial ones do when working together is a thin one, so I don’t think this ruling is the last word.
The U.S. Copyright review board said that this goes against the basic tenets of copyright law, which suggest that the work must be the product of a human mind. “Thaler must either provide evidence that the Work is the product of human authorship or convince the Office to depart from a century of copyright jurisprudence. He has done neither,” wrote the review board in its decision. Source: U.S. Copyright Office Rules That AI Cannot Hold Copyright | ARTnews.com
Julian Stodd’s personal realisation that what the people who make ‘productivity tools’ want and what he wants might be two different things.
See also: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
I feel that at time i have lost the art of long form and collapsed into the conversational and reactive.
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Does technology always make us more productive – or can technology hold us apart? Do we need to be together to forge culture, and to find meaning, or can being together make us more busy than wise?
I suspect my personal (and perhaps our organisational) challenge is one of separation: to separate out my segregated spaces – to separate my thinking and doing, my learning and acting, my reflection and practice. Source: The Delusion of Productivity | Julian Stodd’s Learning Blog
It’s perhaps a massive over-simplification, but my understanding of the so-called ‘skills gap’ is that two things are happening.
The first is a long-term trend for employers expecting to have to spend zero dollars on training for the people they hire.
The second is the use of algorithmic scanning of CV-scanning software to reject the majority of applicants. Not surprisingly, although it might make recruiters' jobs a bit more manageable, it’s not great for diversity or finding people who haven’t done that exact job before.
Matt Baer, who founded the excellent platform write.as, weighs in on misinformation and disinformation.
This is something I’m interested in anyway given my background in digital literacies, but especially at the moment because of the user research I’m doing around the Zappa project.
I think the closest “solution” to misinformation (incidental) and disinformation (intentional) online is always going to be a widespread understanding that, as a user, you should be inherently skeptical of what you see and hear digitally.
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As long as human interactions are mediated by a screen (or goggles in the coming “metaverse”), there will be a certain loss of truth, social clues, and context in our interactions — clues that otherwise help us determine “truthiness” of information and trustworthiness of actors. There will also be a constant chance for middlemen to meddle in the medium, for better or worse, especially as we get farther from controlling the infrastructure ourselves. Source: “Solving” Misinformation | Matt
When work is the most significant thing in your life, you optimise for it. When relationships are are the most significant things in your life, you optimise for those.
I find this post by ‘crypto engineer’ Nat Eliason a bit tragic, to be honest. He says he’s almost always working, there’s zero mention of family, and he says that all of his friends are people who are hustling too.
As Socrates didn’t say, “the life run by spreadsheet is not worth living”.
I’m almost always working.
This is not some Tim Ferrissian “here’s how to work 2 hours a day and make lots of money” post. I tried that. It sucks. You’ll get depressed in about two days if you have an ounce of ambition in you. If you’re trying to optimize around working less, find better work.
It doesn’t mean, though, that I’m always doing things that feel like work. It means I enjoy the work that I do, and I’ve found ways to make my hobbies productive. Source: How to Be Really, Really, Ridiculously Productive | Nat Eliason
Today is a Wednesday and I’m taking a half-day off today and tomorrow as it’s half-term for the kids. But, pre-pandemic I used to take Wednesday off in its entirety which was absolutely amazing and I’m not sure why I don’t still do it.
There’s a real movement growing at the moment for a four-day week, which I think is a really positive thing for humanity. Let’s just hope it’s not just white collar workers who can afford to reap the benefits.
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Given that most gambling these days happens via smartphone apps, and that the psychological tricks used by gambling firms are also used by, for example, for-profit centralised social media sites, I found this fascinating (and worrying!)
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When I was eight years old, we took a family trip to the Orkney islands off the north coast of Scotland. I don’t know why we went there particularly, but it was amazing. I almost don’t want to go back because it might break the spell the place has cast over my life.
While were were there, with no kind of tourist fanfare I was allowed to handle skulls that were thousands of years old, crawl into tombs, and generally really experience history. I doubt they have such a cavalier approach to artefacts these days…
I’m an OG when it comes to MP3 players, having owned an Archos MP3 Jukebox while I was at uni in about 2001. It was ridiculously expensive for me as a student, but I was working at HMV at the time, and I was (and still am!) really into music.
In the end, I ‘upgraded’ the battery in it and managed to melt the entire thing, then switched to Spotify for all of my music in 2009. But there’s definitely part of me that wants to get back to what I would consider ‘real’ music listening.
While I do have plenty of MP3s and FLAC files on my smartphone, there’s just something about having a separate device for music. And you don’t get more iconic than an iPod. So this project is super-cool and once again has me thinking…
See also: How To Enjoy Your Own Digital Music
See also: ListenBrainz
Anyway. Over the weekend I took apart a 5.5th gen iPod Classic (or iPod Video) and made it suit 2022 a little better :D Source: Building an iPod for 2022 | Ellie.wtf
It’s good to have Warren Ellis back. I have no opinion on this other than we should believe women when they accuse men of abuse.
His reflections on going analogue in 2021 and then coming back to digital workflows is interesting.
“But just because something makes waves on Twitter doesn’t mean it actually matters to most people. According to the Pew Research Center, only 23 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and of those users, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” In other words, nearly all tweets come from less than 6 percent of American adults. This is not a remotely good representation of public opinion, let alone newsworthiness, and treating it as such will inevitably result in wrong conclusions."
I’m not as up to date on some things as I used to be, but, framing it like that — what am I really missing? Value is not necessarily intrinsic to a digital service (or most other things). We choose to invest these things with value. And sometimes we’re too caught up in the stream to reframe these things and do a proper test on them. It doesn’t feel right to celebrate snapping out of long-term behavioral loops that one allowed to form in the first damn place. One just gets it done and then keeps getting it done until it’s better, I think.
There’s a tech industry term: dogfooding. It means using your own product or service. The inventor of Twitter fucks off to silent tech-free meditation retreats for weeks at a time. How was that not a red flag? Source: Going Analogue, Returning To Digital – WARREN ELLIS LTD
About 18 months ago, Google acquired Neverware, a company who took the open source version of Chrome OS and customised it for the schools market.
The new version of Chrome OS, called ‘Flex’, can be installed on pretty much any device and also includes Linux containers. Interesting!
Rick Klau, formerly of Google Ventures, is a big fan of OKRs (or ‘Objectives and Key Results’). They’re different from KPIs (or ‘Key Performance Indicators’) for various reasons, including the fact that they’re transparent to everyone in the organisation, and build on one another towards organisational goals.
In this post, Klau talks about OKRs as a form of organisational memory, which is why he’s not fond of changing them half-way through a cycle just because there’s new information available.
Nesta shares its ‘Future Signals’ for 2022, some predictions about how things might shake out this year. I’d draw your attention in particular to climate inactivism coupled with quantifying carbon, as well as health inequalities around the quality of sleep.
The history geek in me loves this so much. And the educator interested in digital literacies loves the fact that you have to manipulate the URL to generate different types of village / town / city!
Source: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
As Cory Doctorow points out, merely putting something on a blockchain doesn’t make the data itself ‘trusted’ (or useful!)
In passing, it’s interesting that he cites Vinay Gupta in the piece, as Vinay is someone I’ve historically had a lot of time for. However, Mattereum (NFTs for physical assets) just… seems like a distraction from more important work he’s previously done?
if: problem + blockchain = problem - blockchain
then: blockchain = 0
The blockchain hasn’t added anything to the situation, except considerable cost (which could just as easily be spent on direct transfers to poor farmers, assuming you could find someone you trust to hand out the money) and complexity (which creates lots of opportunities for cheating). Source: The Inevitability of Trusted Third Parties | Cory Doctorow
This was linked to in the latest issue of Dense Discovery with the question of who amongst the readership has taken up a hobby recently?
As Anne Helen Petersen points out, it’s really hard to start a new hobby as an adult, not only for logistical reasons but because of the self-narrative that goes with it.
For me, the gulf between how good I am at something when starting it, and how good I want to be at a thing is often just too off-putting…
Six per cent isn’t a lot, but perhaps a number of approaches working together can help with this?
I work an average of about 25 hours per week and I’m tired at the end of it. I can’t even imagine how I coped in my twenties while teaching.
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A useful and illustrative story from Sheila Heen, author of Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most, about why it’s useful to understand other people’s context.
Now, the kid seemed bright in most other ways. So I just thought like, what is going on with him? My first hypothesis is maybe he’s color blind, which then that would be my husband’s fault. At least I thought at the time, it’s my husband’s fault. I’ve since been informed it would have been my fault.
So I started collecting data. I’m running a little scientific experiment of my own. So I start asking him to identify red and green in other contexts, and he gets it right every time. And yet every time we come to a traffic light, he’s still giving me opposite answers, because I get a little obsessed with this.
My second hypothesis, by the way, is that he is screwing with me, which I certainly had some data to support. This went on for about three weeks. It wasn’t until maybe three weeks later, and I think my mother-in-law was in town. So I was in the back seat sitting next to Ben, and we stopped at a traffic light. And I suddenly realized that from where he sits in his car seat, he usually can’t see the light in front of us, because the headrest is in the way or it’s above the level of the windshield, windscreen as they say in Europe. So he’s looking out the side window at the cross traffic light.
Now just think about the conversation from his point of view. He’s looking at the light, it’s green; I’m insisting that it’s red, and he’s like, you know, my mother seems right in most other ways, but she’s just wrong about this. The reason that that experience has stuck with me all these years is that it’s such a great illustration of the fact that where you sit determines what you see. Source: Red Light Green Light | James Sevedge
This is a useful term for “the intersection of burnout, imposter syndrome, and anxiety”.
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I quit Twitter at the start of December. Despite being an early adopter, joining in the same year as my son was born, 15 years later it’s gone from a force for good to a rage machine. I don’t want anything more to do with it.
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The authors analysed the “algorithmic amplification” effect on tweets from 3,634 elected politicians from major political parties in seven countries with a large user base on Twitter: the US, Japan, the UK, France, Spain, Canada and Germany.
Algorithmic amplification refers to the extent to which a tweet is more likely to be seen on a regular Twitter feed (where the algorithm is operating) compared to a feed without automated recommendations.
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The researchers found that in six out of the seven countries (Germany was the exception), the algorithm significantly favoured the amplification of tweets from politically right-leaning sources.
Overall, the amplification trend wasn’t significant among individual politicians from specific parties, but was when they were taken together as a group. The starkest contrasts were seen in Canada (the Liberals’ tweets were amplified 43%, versus those of the Conservatives at 167%) and the UK (Labour’s tweets were amplified 112%, while the Conservatives’ were amplified at 176%). Source: Twitter’s algorithm favours the political right, a recent study finds | The Conversation
This comes at things from a branding/advertising perspective, but I appreciate the focus on clarity of language. After all, clarity of language is clarity of thought.
In the traditional industry sense, “idea” means a novel concept. But when it’s used as in this example, it masks the lack of an actual idea — like when someone dumps in the word “strategic” before they say something that’s not strategic. It ups the importance of what comes next. The problem: sometimes this works as a meeting tactic but does not lead to good or clear thinking.
Compare this thought with the use of the word “idea” as a novel concept: “I have an idea — I want to create a tool that runners can use to track how far they’ve run and then compete with each other by sharing their achievements via the Internet. They’ll track it via this technology in their shoe which will talk to their computer.” Source: How to explain an idea: a mega post | Mark Pollard
On the one hand, I’m glad that the BBC is ensuring that some of its archive material is a bit more in keeping with our (hopefully more enlightened) sensibilities.
However, on the other hand, why do this in secret?
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This raises a host of important questions — chief among which is: Why, if “the vast majority” of the BBC’s audience expects the organization to render its archives more “suitable,” has it been doing so in secret? Again: In the Internet age, changes made to source material tend to be iterative rather than additive. When the New York Times updates a story in its newspaper, one can plausibly obtain both copies. By contrast, when the New York Times updates a story on its website, the original page disappears. By its own admission, the BBC has been deleting entire sketches from comedy series that are 50, 60, or 70 years old, many of which can be heard only with the BBC’s permission. Are we simply to assume that the public supports this development? And, if so, are we permitted to wonder why the BBC was not open about it? Source: BBC Censors Its Own Archives | National Review
I’ve always been against private schooling. I’m glad that others, even those who went to them themselves, are also seeing how bad they are for society.
This is the same reason McDonald’s opened a branch in Soviet Moscow, but that was fine because, as far as I know, McDonald’s has never applied for charitable status. What is astonishing is how, by conducting themselves in this way, private schools seem to have given up on making a meaningful argument to retain that status themselves. They’ve just stopped caring about the views of the likes of me. Is the right wing of the Conservative party now so completely dominant that the idea of keeping the sympathy of anyone on the left or in the centre feels like a waste of time? Source: Expansionist private schools need a lesson in morality | David Mitchell | The Guardian
I still find it hard to trust Johann Hari’s writing, but this is more introspective and covers a subject that we all know is an issue: attention.
For me, despite being ‘verified’ on Twitter and having what used to be considered a decent number of followers, I’ve deactivated my account. I think it’s for the last time. I’m so much calmer when not using it.
A massive over-simplification, but then that’s the point of 2x2 grids. Of course, everyone wants to think they’re in the top-right corner…
Using real-time satellite imagery to ensure that people are building (or not-building) what they say they’re going to.
It’s possible to be entirely in favour mass vaccination (as I am) while also concerned about the over-reach of states with our personal health data.
As this article discusses, based on a report from an German non-profit called AlgorithmWatch, such health surveillance is being normalised due to the requirements of responding to a global pandemic.
The report also highlighted the growing divide between people who fervently defend the schemes and those who staunchly oppose them - and how fear and misinformation have influenced both sides. Source: Pandemic Exploited To Normalise Mass Surveillance? | The ASEAN Post
At over two hours long, I’m still only half-way through this video but I can already highly recommend it. There’s some technical language, as befits the nature of what’s discussed, but I really appreciate it going right back to the financial crisis to explain what’s going on.
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
Source: The Problem With NFTs | YouTube
You’d expect Jacobin to be against crypto, but this is the first level-headed explanation of the ‘Tether controversy’ I’ve seen.
Tether has effectively become the central bank of crypto. Like central banks, they ensure liquidity in the market and even engage in quantitative easing — the practice of central banks buying up financial assets in order to stimulate the economy and stabilize financial markets. The difference is that central banks, at least in theory, operate in the public good and try to maintain healthy levels of inflation that encourage capital investment. By comparison, private companies issuing stablecoins are indiscriminately inflating cryptocurrency prices so that they can be dumped on unsuspecting investors.
This renders cryptocurrency not merely a bad investment or speculative bubble but something more akin to a decentralized Ponzi scheme. New investors are being lured in under the pretense that speculation is driving prices when market manipulation is doing the heavy lifting.
This can’t go on forever. Unbacked stablecoins can and are being used to inflate the “spot price” — the latest trading price — of cryptocurrencies to levels totally disconnected from reality. But the electricity costs of running and securing blockchains is very real. If cryptocurrency markets cannot keep luring in enough new money to cover the growing costs of mining, the scheme will become unworkable and financially insolvent.
No one knows exactly how this would shake out, but we know that investors will never be able to realize the gains they have made on paper. The cryptocurrency market’s oft-touted $2 trillion market cap, calculated by multiplying existing coins by the latest spot price, is a meaningless figure. Nowhere near that much has actually been invested into cryptocurrencies, and nowhere near that much will ever come out of them. Source: Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme | Jacobin
Handy article, especially for those deep in the ‘capitalist realism’ (or neoliberalism) that the author describes.
While it is possible for DAOs to emulate cooperative governance, it’s more common to observe the easier-to-implement governance pattern of one-token, one-vote, since verifying one’s personhood is still a nascent field in the world of blockchain.
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From my experiences in the two spaces, I have noticed that DAOs tend to be better at enabling collective ownership at scale, even if their cultural understanding of the rights, responsibilities, and accountability associated with ownership is comparatively underdeveloped. And while cooperatives tend to be less successful in securing funding, they are also more likely, through their sober rejection of capitalist realism, to correctly address the root causes of inequity. Below, I’ll share some of the key takeaways I have gleaned about what DAOs and co-ops can learn from each other. Source: What Co-ops and DAOs Can Learn From Each Other
Handy. I do like typologies and scales.
But hype is not always the same; there are different forms and levels. I‘ve been trying my hand on a categorization based on my experience and my understanding of the phenomenon. This categorization is intended to help people better understand which form of hype they‘re confronted with.
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Think of this scale as form of Richter scale to get a feel of how bad the hype is. A new technology doesn’t have to move through every single level but it most likely will at least reach level 3. Source: The five Levels of Hype | Johannes Klingebiel
I don’t agree with Paul Frazee’s point in this post about Twitter vs “p2p Twitters” (by which he means the Fediverse) but otherwise he makes good points about governance and what he calls “operational collectivism”.
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Whoever operates a collective resource has the power to change its implementation. The reason we decentralize operation is to distribute that power of implementation. If the stakeholders have the power of implementation, they’re able to ensure the resource represents their interests.
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Web3 is being discussed as if it’s anything other than the financialisation of everything. This post about ‘Ed3’ really struggles to square that circle when it comes to education. There are so many issues with it that I don’t really know where to start.
The bit that really jumped out for me, though, given that I’ve spent a decade working on Open Badges is the bit on credentialing. The cat is out of the bag by this point, especially in the “only paying for what you need” language. The whole point of education is that you don’t know what kind of person you’ll be at the end of it.
Anything else is just training.
Web3 will also enable the metaverse to take shape over the next few decades; a universe of many buildable worlds that operate on decentralized infrastructure. The metaverse will make it possible to do everything we can do in the real world but enhanced by digital experiences & possible in an entirely virtual world. Source: From Web3 to Ed3 - Reimagining Education in a Decentralized Worl… — Mirror
I’ve been able to touch-type since I was about 12 years of age, thanks to Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Like most people, I use the QWERTY layout, but I’ve always been curious about other layouts.
Apparently, it’s a bit of a myth that QWERTY was designed to slow typists down in case the mechanical keys got stuck. In the last edition of the Ultimate Typing Championship, all but one of the 26 competitors used QWERTY (and the one using the Dvorak layout came 12th).
The main thing to consider, in my opinion, is comfort. I remember being shocked once when I bought a keyboard and it came with a large warning that the use of any keyboard and mouse can cause ‘serious’ injuries.
This article talks about RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury), CTS (Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) and CTP (Carpal Tunnel Pressure).
What about QWERTY specifically? I wasn’t really able to find any research on this. Maybe that’s because it’s very hard to design experiments to test it? You can’t just take a bunch of people and ask half of them to start using Dvorak, because there’s a significant learning curve involved. But you don’t want to find out if learning a new layout is good, you want to find out using it is good once you have learned it. There is no natural control group for these experiments, and no obvious placebo.
In sum, keyboard use in general does seem to cause RSI, but the risk seems fairly small. Bad key layouts may only be a minor part of the RSI risk, though QWERTY does seem worse than most alternatives, relatively speaking. The evidence here is weak and my confidence intervals are wide. Source: How Bad Is QWERTY, Really? A Review of the Literature, such as It Is | Erich Grunewald
My family, especially the female members, have always been big fans of the hot water bottle. So much so, in fact, that one of my wife’s favourite presents was receiving a long snake-shaped hot water bottle that she can use in various configurations.
As we face a bit of an energy crisis, hot water bottles are definitely something more people should be using, as this article explains.
As early as the 1500s, people started to use all kinds of portable containers filled with hot coals from the fire. These were used as foot warmers, hand warmers, and bed warmers. Most were made of metal, either brass or copper, and placed inside wooden or ceramic enclosures to prevent skin burns. Over time, hot coals were replaced by hot water, which is a cleaner and safer heat storage medium.
Initially, these first “real” hot water bottles were made from hard materials such as glass, metal, or stoneware. It was only with the invention of vulcanised rubber in the nineteenth century that more comfortable lightweight and flexible hot water bottles became an option. Spanish friends told me that hot water bottles used to be made from animal skins, but I could not verify this. It may well be true, because all over the world there’s a long tradition of using “water skins” for storing liquids. Source: The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE
This article is based on the author’s experiences as a teacher in state schools in the US. I should imagine the situation is exacerbated there, but it can’t be that great elsewhere, either.
My own kids seem like they’re OK. Our youngest, whose had Covid like me this week, has gone back to remote learning, which she enjoys as she completes her work quickly and then does other things. I think it’s particularly hard on teenagers, like our eldest, who are preparing for important exams.
When we finally got back into the classroom in September 2020, I was optimistic, even as we would go remote for weeks, sometimes months, whenever case numbers would rise. But things never returned to normal.
When we were physically in school, it felt like there was no longer life in the building. Maybe it was the masks that made it so no one wanted to engage in lessons, or even talk about how they spent their weekend. But it felt cold and soulless. My students weren’t allowed to gather in the halls or chat between classes. They still aren’t. Sporting events, clubs and graduation were all cancelled. These may sound like small things, but these losses were a huge deal to the students. These are rites of passages that can’t be made up.
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They are anxious and depressed. Previously outgoing students are now terrified at the prospect of being singled out to stand in front of the class and speak. And many of my students seem to have found comfort behind their masks. They feel exposed when their peers can see their whole face.
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At the beginning of the pandemic, adults shamed kids for wanting to play at the park or hang out with their friends. We kept hearing, “They’ll be fine. They’re resilient.” It’s true that humans, by nature, are very resilient. But they also break. And my students are breaking. Some have already broken.
When we look at the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of history, I believe it will be clear that we betrayed our children. The risks of this pandemic were never to them, but they were forced to carry the burden of it. It’s enough. It’s time for a return to normal life and put an end to the bureaucratic policies that aren’t making society safer, but are sacrificing our children’s mental, emotional, and physical health.
Our children need life on the highest volume. And they need it now. Source: I’m a Public School Teacher. The Kids Aren’t Alright. | Common Sense
As someone who’s recently started using a budgeting app, and who has a lot of music-making equipment lying around unused, I concur.
There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale.
But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.
A new novel, for example, might require twenty dollars for its first price—and ten hours of dedicated reading time for its second. Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one. Paying only the first price is about the same as throwing money in the garbage.
Likewise, after buying the budgeting app, you have to set it all up, and learn to use it habitually before it actually improves your financial life. With the unicycle, you have to endure the presumably painful beginner phase before you can cruise down the street. The kale must be de-veined, chopped, steamed, and chewed before it gives you any nourishment.
If you look around your home, you might notice many possessions for which you’ve paid the first price but not the second. Unused memberships, unread books, unplayed games, unknitted yarns. Source: Everything Must Be Paid for Twice | Raptitude
As with stoicism, we’ve lost the ancient meaning of the word ‘cynicism’. I think you can probably tell a lot about how much love I have for Diogenes given that I named my phone after him (I name all my devices so I can easily identify them on wifi networks, etc.)
The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”).
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To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several original cynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and in many cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.
Not only has the current UK government underfunded the NHS since coming to power in an attempt to introduce market-based medicine, orchestrated the unprecedented national self-sabotage that is Brexit, and attacked the BBC, but they’re also trying to convince the British public that end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is only wanted by paedophiles.
The hypocrisy of it knows no bounds. These are the same politicians who rely on the E2EE of WhatsApp, Signal, and other messaging services to plot against one another and society in general.
Good security demands that data that we share amongst family and friends should remain available only to those family and friends; and likewise that data which we share with businesses should remain only with those businesses, and should only be used for agreed business purposes.
Network providers — and, importantly, messaging-network and social-network providers — are helping their users obtain better data security by cutting themselves off from the ability to access plaintext content. Simply: they don’t need to see it, and it’s not their job to police or censor it. Their adoption of end-to-end encryption makes everyone’s data safer.
The world needs end-to-end encryption. It needs more of it. We need the privacy, agency, and control over data that end-to-end encryption enables. And encryption is needed everywhere and by everyone — not just by politicians and police forces. Source: Why we need #EndToEndEncryption and why it’s essential for our safety, our children’s safety, and for everyone’s future #noplacetohide | dropsafe
As someone who’s seemingly around the same age as the author of this post, I agree that the internet has made my life better. I didn’t have it anywhere near as hard as them while growing up, but my online connections (and research) have certainly helped me escape into a different life.
I don’t often share this kind of thing because I find it distressing. We shouldn’t be surprised, though, that the kind of people who physically, sexually, and emotionally abuse other humans beings also do so in virtual worlds, too.
On the one hand, users who flex their darkest impulses on chatbots could have those worst behaviors reinforced, building unhealthy habits for relationships with actual humans. On the other hand, being able to talk to or take one’s anger out on an unfeeling digital entity could be cathartic.
But it’s worth noting that chatbot abuse often has a gendered component. Although not exclusively, it seems that it’s often men creating a digital girlfriend, only to then punish her with words and simulated aggression. These users’ violence, even when carried out on a cluster of code, reflect the reality of domestic violence against women. Source: Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them | Futurism
I came across this story via Benedict Evans' newsletter (it’s not the kind of thing I’d usually track). What I find interesting is this is a hugely successful rollout of a digital payments system done by a central bank. It’s helping real people, including those in poverty.
Meanwhile, crypto tokens are held by crypto bros and middle-class white guys like myself trying to make a quick buck. Just goes to show that innovation doesn’t always come from where you expect.
Pix, rolled out by the Banco Central do Brasil in Nov. 2020, was built for efficiency and financial inclusion. It now has 107.5 million registered accounts, more than half of the country’s population. One year after implementation, more than half a trillion Brazilian reais were transacted through the low-cost payments system last month. According to central bank data, Pix payments volume is already equivalent to 80% of debit and credit card transactions.
[…]
“Except for very particular transactions, market penetration tends to 99% on all individual transfers,” [Julian Colombo, CEO of banking technology firm N5] added. However, the rollout has not been without hiccups, including kidnapping.
[…]
On a recent Sunday in Rio de Janeiro, a three-member samba band played for a crowded restaurant. At the end, they passed around the tambourine to collect money. One diner apologized, saying he did not have any cash on him. The drummer said, “No problem, I take Pix,” and proceeded to share his code — which can be an email, phone number or other easy-to-remember code — with the diner, who promptly transferred the money his way. Source: Pix breaks ground in Brazil, shakes up payments market | S&P Global Market Intelligence
This is a useful diagram to share in order to demonstrate that we might think we’re shafted with regards to climate change, but that pales into insignificance compared to pollution from chemicals and plastics.
“Some of these pollutants can be found globally, from the Arctic to Antarctica, and can be extremely persistent. We have overwhelming evidence of negative impacts on Earth systems, including biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles,” says Carney Almroth.
Global production and consumption of novel entities is set to continue to grow. The total mass of plastics on the planet is now over twice the mass of all living mammals, and roughly 80% of all plastics ever produced remain in the environment.
Plastics contain over 10,000 other chemicals, so their environmental degradation creates new combinations of materials – and unprecedented environmental hazards. Production of plastics is set to increase and predictions indicate that the release of plastic pollution to the environment will rise too, despite huge efforts in many countries to reduce waste. Source: Safe planetary boundary for pollutants, including plastics, exceeded, say researchers | Stockholm Resilience Centre
I don’t have a particularly strong interest in sci-fi, nor do I have access to all of this paywalled post. However, I don’t need either to share a couple of insights.
First, I agree that the utopia/dystopia distinction are two sides of the same coin depending on what your view of what constitutes a flourishing human life. You don’t need to look far in our current situation to see that in action.
Second, while I’d probably broadly agree with the three conditions for optimism the author lays out, you could technically argue against all of them.
But in fact I submit that in order to be truly optimistic, a sci-fi world needs more than just a stirring theme song. It needs to present a future with several concrete features corresponding to the type of future people want to imagine actually living in. The “Wang Standard” is a good start, with its emphasis on the power of human effort, but in the end it relies on the somewhat circular notion of a “radically better” future. What does it mean for the future to be better? I submit that for a future to feel optimistic, it should feature the following elements:
I like this post by graduate student Beck Tench. Reading is useless, she says, in the same way that meditation is useless. It’s for its own sake, not for something else.
This quarter’s experiment was an effort to allow myself space to “read to read,” nothing more and certainly nothing less. With more time and fewer expectations, I realized that so much happens while I read, the most important of which are the moments and hours of my life. I am smelling, hearing, seeing, feeling, even tasting. What I read takes up place in my thoughts, yes, and also in my heart and bones. My body, which includes my brain, reads along with me and holds the ideas I encounter.
This suggests to me that reading isn’t just about knowing in an intellectual way, it’s also about holding what I read. The things I read this quarter were held by my body, my dreams, my conversations with others, my drawings and journal entries. I mean holding in an active way, like holding something in your hands in front of you. It takes endurance and patience to actively hold something for very long. As scholars, we need to cultivate patience and endurance for what we read. We need to hold it without doing something with it right away, without having to know. Source: Reading is Useless: A 10-Week Experiment in Contemplative Reading | Beck Tench
This article in The Atlantic by Alan Lightman points out how biophilic we have been historically as a species, and how that’s changed only recently.
None of this, of course, helps with the climate emergency and the concomitant biodiversity collapse. I read the WEF Global Risks Report for 2022 and, well, I’ve read more hopeful documents.
It was not always this way. For more than 99 percent of our history as humans, we lived close to nature. We lived in the open. The first house with a roof appeared only 5,000 years ago. Television less than a century ago. Internet-connected phones only about 30 years ago. Over the large majority of our 2-million-year evolutionary history, Darwinian forces molded our brains to find kinship with nature, what the biologist E. O. Wilson called “biophilia.” That kinship had survival benefit. Habitat selection, foraging for food, reading the signs of upcoming storms all would have favored a deep affinity with nature. Social psychologists have documented that such sensitivities are still present in our psyches today. Further psychological and physiological studies have shown that more time spent in nature increases happiness and well-being; less time increases stress and anxiety. Thus, there is a profound disconnect between the natureless environment we have created and the “natural” affections of our minds. In effect, we live in two worlds: a world in close contact with nature, buried deep in our ancestral brains, and a natureless world of the digital screen and constructed environment, fashioned from our technology and intellectual achievements. We are at war with our ancestral selves. The cost of this war is only now becoming apparent.
[…]
This by Jakob Greenfeld reminds me of Buster Benson’s evergreen post Live like a hydra — especially the sub-section ‘Seven modes (for seven heads)’.
Of course, you can’t always be driven by what mood you happen to be in. Sometimes, you have to change things up to ensure that your mood changes. But hey, all bets are off during a pandemic, right?
It costs $0 and no, it’s not some note-taking or to-do list system.
In short:
Step 1: develop meta-awareness of your state of mind.
Step 2: pattern-match to identify your mind’s most common modes.
Step 3: learn to pick activities that match each mode. Source: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind) – Jakob Greenfeld
I enjoyed some of these untranslatable words from languages other than English.
Gyakugire (Japanese) Getting mad at somebody because they got mad at you for something you did.
Bear favour (Swedish) To do something for someone with good intentions, but it actually has negative consequences instead. Source: Does Not Translate – Words that don’t translate to other languages
I love articles that give us a different lens for looking at the world, and this one certainly does that. It also provides links for further reading, which I very much appreciate.
Although the Mohists wrote more than 2,000 years ago, their ideas sound familiar to modern ears. We frequently hear how we should avoid supposedly useless things, such as pursuing the arts, or a humanities education (see the all-too-frequent slashing of liberal arts budgets at universities). Or it’s often said that we should allow for these things only insofar as they benefit the economy or human welfare. You might have felt this discomfort in your own life: the pressure from the meritocracy to serve some purpose, have some benefit, maximise some utility – that everything you do should be, in some sense, useful.
However, as we will show here, Zhuangzi offers an essential antidote to this pernicious means-ends way of thinking. He demonstrates that you can improve your life if you let go of the anxiety of wanting to serve a purpose. To be sure, Zhuangzi doesn’t altogether spurn usefulness. Rather, he argues that usefulness itself should not be life’s bottom line. Source: How to be useless | Psyche Guides
I didn’t know Stephen Downes had a political blog. These are his thoughts on cancel culture which, like most of what he says in general, I agree with.
“You are the one complaining about cancel culture because you are the one who uses silencing and suppression as political tools to advance your own interests and maintain your own power.
“You are complaining about cancel culture because the people you have always silenced are beginning to have a voice, and they are beginning to say, we won’t be silent any more.
“And when you say the people working against racism and misogyny and oppression are silencing you, that tells us exactly who – and what – you are.”
“Your accusations are your confessions.” Source: Cancelled | Leftish
I’ve been reading a report entitled Crypto Theses for 2022 recently. Despite having some small investments in crypto, the world that’s painted in that report is, quite frankly, dystopian.
The author of that report admits to being on the right of politics and, to my mind, this is the problem: we’ve got people who believe that societal control and monetisation of all of the things in a free market economy is desirable.
This article focuses on Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement at the end of 2021 about the ‘metaverse’. This is something which is a goal of the awkwardly-titled ‘web3’ movement.
Perhaps I’m getting old, but to me technology should be about enabling humans to do new things or existing things better. As far as I can see, crypto/web3 just adds a DRM and monetisation layer on top of the open web?
In another sense, it’s a vision that takes our existing reality — where you can already hang out in 2D or 3D virtual chat rooms with friends who are or are not using VR headsets — and tacks on more opportunities for monetization and advertising. Source: Zuckerberg Convinced the Tech World That ‘the Metaverse’ Is the Future | Business Insider
Jason Kottke reminds us of Toni Morrison’s “Ten Steps Towards Fascism” from 1995. As an historian, it was this bit that he also quoted that jumped out at me, though.
It’s terrifying when you think about it too much. (Most people in a position to do anything about it seemingly aren’t thinking about it…)
Source: Toni Morrison’s Ten Steps Towards Fascism
I think Albert Wenger has discovered, however obliquely, Pragmatism. Once you realise that the correspondence theory of truth is nonsense, and that it makes more sense to think about truth as being “good in the way of belief” the world starts making a lot more sense…
But does that mean the theories frequently cited to explain these practices are also valid? Do chakras and energy flows exist? I don’t want to rule this out – there have been various attempts to map chakras to the nervous and endocrine systems – but I think it is much more likely that these are pre-scientific explanations not unlike the phlogiston theory of combustion. I will refer to these as “internal theories,” meaning the theories that are generally associated with the practices historically. Source: A Short Note on Persistent Practices | Continuations
The way that you do something is almost as important as what you do. However, I’ve definitely noticed that, during the pandemic as people get used to working remotely (as I’ve done for a decade now) there’s definitely been some, let’s say, ‘theatre’ added to it all.
Shared documents and messaging channels are also playgrounds of performativity. Colleagues can leave public comments in documents, and in the process notify their authors that something approximating work has been done. They can start new channels and invite anyone in; when no one uses them, they can archive them again and appear efficient. By assigning tasks to people or tagging them in a conversation, they can cast long shadows of faux-industriousness. It is telling that one recent research study found that members of high-performing teams are more likely to speak to each other on the phone, the very opposite of public communication.
Performative celebration is another hallmark of the pandemic. Once one person has reacted to a message with a clapping emoji, others are likely to join in until a virtual ovation is under way. At least emojis are fun. The arrival of a round-robin email announcing a promotion is as welcome as a rifle shot in an avalanche zone. Someone responds with congratulations, and then another recipient adds their own well wishes. As more people pile in, pressure builds on the non-responders to reply as well. Within minutes colleagues are telling someone they have never met in person how richly they deserve their new job. Source: The rise of performative work | The Economist
I’m not sure who’s behind this website, but it looks good. I appreciated the historical context behind vaccine hesitancy in cultures other than my own provided in the most recent post.
Anti-vaxxers adjacent to conspiracy theorists are nuts, but there’s definitely a communications angle to ensuring the effective roll-out of life-saving vaccines.
After the serious epidemic of 1836, official efforts intensified, with barber-vaccinators being trained and records kept. Gradually, the message got through and by 1850, the decline in child mortality was affecting the population statistics. The following anecdote, describes a perhaps surprising pocket of vaccine hesitancy. Source: Vaccine Hesitancy – Egypt 1866 | Plague Anthology
This is good fun and, in fact, Laura and I used it to structure the upcoming Season 3 trailer for our podcast.
My first response to most new technological things is usually “cool, I wonder how I/we could use that?” With so-called ‘web3’, though, I’ve kind of thought it was bullshit.
This post by Moxie Marlinspike, CEO of Signal, goes a step forward and includes opinions by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.
I’m not sure what I think about the bit quoted below about not distributing infrastructure? In Marxist terms, it seems like not distributing or providing ownership of the means of production?
Update: Moxie Marlinspike has announced he’s stepping down as Signal CEO.
Someone I once knew well used to cite Gramsci’s famous quotation: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” I’m having to channel that as I look forward to 2022.
Here’s the well-informed writer Charlie Stross on the ways he sees things panning out.
Politics: we’re boned there, too. Frightened people are cautious people, and they don’t like taking in refugees. We currently see a wave of extreme right-wing demagogues in power in various nations, and increasingly harsh immigration laws all round. I can’t help thinking that this is the ruling kleptocracy battening down the hatches and preparing to fend off the inevitable mass migrations they expect when changing sea levels inundate low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh. The klept built their wealth on iron and coal, then oil: they invested in real estate, inflated asset bubble after asset bubble, drove real estate prices and job security out of reach of anyone aged under 50, and now they’d like to lock in their status by freezing social mobility. The result is a grim dystopia for the young—and by “young” I mean anyone who isn’t aged, or born with a trust fund—and denial of the changing climate is a touchstone. The propaganda of the Koch network and the Mercer soft money has corrupted political discourse in the US, and increasingly the west in general. Australia and the UK have their own turbulent billionaires manipulating the political process. Source: Oh, 2022! | Charlie’s Diary
This guy went back to using a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 and explains why in this post. Over Christmas, I replaced some of the cosmetic parts of my X220, which is also from 2012.
It’s amazing how usable it still is, and I actively prefer the keyboard over the more modern ones.
I’d like to thank Intel here for making this possible. The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022. Without this, my laptop would likely be obsolete by now. Source: Why I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
Utter madness.
Landing and departure slots for popular routes in the biggest airports are an extremely precious commodity in the industry, and to keep them, airlines have to guarantee a high percentage of flights. It is why loss-making flights have to be maintained to ensure companies keep their slots.
It was an accepted practice despite the pollution concerns, but the pandemic slump in flying put that in question. Normally, airlines had to use 80% of their given slots to preserve their rights, but the EU has cut that to 50% to ensure as few empty or near-empty planes crisscross the sky as possible. Source: Near-empty flights crisscross Europe to secure landing slots | AP News
It seems like we’re learning a lot in a very short space of time about viruses and immunity. Happily, this might lead to breakthroughs in all sorts of areas.
[…]
But what explains this natural immunity? The most likely theory is that these people’s immune systems have already been exposed to similar viruses, years or decades earlier. Sars-Cov-2 is one of a family of seven human coronaviruses, most of which cause the common cold. All of these viruses look fairly similar. When your T-cells learn how to fight one, they get better at fighting them all, it is thought.
Another, less well-researched answer lies in our genes. Some people might simply be born with an immunity to certain viruses, scientists suspect.
[…]
If it turns out that some people are indeed naturally immune to Covid, it’s wonderful news for them. But it might also help the rest of us, speeding up development of a pan-coronavirus vaccine capable of defeating any variant. The current generation of Covid vaccines were all designed to target the spike protein, on the virus’s outer edge. But the spike protein also changes frequently, each time the virus mutates. This means vaccines are slightly less effective against each new variant.
But natural immunity appears to work differently. In the UCL trial, researchers looked carefully at the blood of those volunteers who seemed to have pre-existing immunity to the virus. Rather than targeting the spike protein, their T-cells were targeting proteins at the centre of the virus. These proteins are much less likely to change from mutation to mutation. In fact, they tend to be found in most coronaviruses, not just Sars-Cov-2. If a vaccine could be built to target these inner proteins, it might just be able to defeat all variants – as well as a range of other coronaviruses. Source: Why some people keep getting Covid – and others never at all | The Telegraph
As someone who is apparently in a microgeneration between Generation X and Millennials, I feel constantly the tension between the “old ways” of doing things and the “throwing things against the wall to see what sticks” approach.
This article frames the issue nicely: everyone has something to teach, no matter whether you’re the person with lots of experience to share, or the person with the new approach.
Neither should be the case, because every generation cycles through the same process. Today’s older generation once understood the world better than their parents, who scoffed at them. Today’s younger generation will one day be stuck in the antiquated norms of their past, and their kids will scoff at them. I can imagine my son in 80 years screaming, “Get off my metaverse lawn!”
One takeaway from this is that no age has a monopoly on insight, and different levels of experience offer different kinds of lessons. Vishal Khandelwal recently wrote that old guys don’t understand tech, but young guys don’t understand risk. Another way to put it is: everyone has something to teach. Source: Experts From A World That No Longer Exists · Collaborative Fund
Image: CC BY Tea, two sugars
This post is focusing on technical teams looking after software. But it can also apply to anything where systems are being developed and/or maintained.
It’s important to point out that the final image here is still incomplete. We’ll never fit all of the contexts into a single model. We could keep going, adding more and more context. A fascinating one, for example, would be marking the beginning of the COVID pandemic, when a team that perhaps was colocated started working remotely, and when stress and risk of burnout increased considerably. Otherwise, we’ll eventually include the whole world, but it’s interesting to continually zoom out and see how a new lens helps frame our perspectives.
[…]
Many organizations have adopted the practice of doing “post-mortems” or “retrospectives” after incidents. Retrospectives are great! Unfortunately, I think a lot of learning is left on the table by the adoption of template-driven processes that produce shallow understandings of what transpired. I’ve spoken about how I think we can improve this. There are also experts in the field who provide training and consulting in incident analysis. There are also communities and companies dedicated to helping you improve this practice. Source: Sociotechnical Lenses into Software Systems | Paul Osman
This seems obvious to me: that luck plays a great part in success. Well, serendipity, perhaps which can always be given a helping hand by elite networks and pushy parents…
But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.
The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.
And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures.
What factors, then, determine how individuals become wealthy? Could it be that chance plays a bigger role than anybody expected? And how can these factors, whatever they are, be exploited to make the world a better and fairer place? Source: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance. | MIT Technology Review
Image: CC BY-ND fearthekumquat
I’ve followed Tressie McMillan Cottom on Twitter ever since she did a keynote for ALT a few years ago. In this article for The New York Times, she talks about ‘advice culture’.
Cottom is wonderfully forthright in her interactions on Twitter, so I was expecting her to rail against advice culture. Instead, she talks about it as a form of small talk, and (I suppose) a form of necessary social glue.
Advice culture is so pervasive that it must serve some other function, do something more than assuage insecurities or performing status. Sociologists generally agree that advice is up there with small talk for how it facilitates human connection between strangers. But I recently began thinking advice is no longer a mere subset of small talk but has become our culture’s default common language. Advice is small talk. The decline of social associations like the Rotary Club and the bowling leagues not only weakened our connections to community; it also atrophied our linguistic tool kit. Source: Why Everyone Is Always Giving Unsolicited Advice | The New York Times
Aged 18, I was rejected at the last hurdle from the Royal Air Force for a scholarship which would have paid for my university tuition. The reason? I’d just started suffering from migraines.
There are lots of different types of triggers, but common to all types is stress. That’s not so good if you’re looking to be employed in Fighter Command.
In many ways, I dodged a bullet (literally and metaphorically!) by not joining the RAF, but migraines have been a constant struggle. In the past few years I’ve had a lot fewer of them, something I put down to reducing my stress levels and taking an L-Theanine supplement every day.
However, this article focuses on the benefits of a plant-based diet for migraine sufferers. I stopped eating meat in 2017 and then eliminated fish too, turning vegetarian in January of this year. It looks like that might have been a great idea not only from an animal welfare point of view, but in terms of my own welfare too!
He had tried prescribed medication, yoga and meditation, and cut out potential trigger foods in an effort to reduce the severity and frequency of his severe headaches – but nothing worked. The migraines made it almost impossible to perform his job, he said.
But within a month of starting a plant-based diet that included lots of dark-green leafy vegetables, his migraines disappeared. The man has not had a migraine in more than seven years, and cannot remember the last time he had a headache. The case was reported in the journal BMJ Case Reports. Source: Man’s severe migraines ‘completely eliminated’ on plant-based diet | Nutrition | The Guardian
Some reflections by Nick Milton on why knowledge management within organisations is so poor. If I were him, I would have included the below illustration from gapingvoid as I think it illustrates his five points rather well.
[…]
Secondly, a common problem (a corollary of the first) is that project knowledge may never have been recorded in project documents.
[…]
Thirdly, and a corollary to the first two, the vast majority of project information is not knowledge anyway. If you are relying on project documents as a source of knowledge, you will be relying on a very diluted source - a lot of noise and not much signal.
[…]
Fourthly, if there is codified knowledge in the project documents, it tends to be scattered across many documents and many projects.
[…]
Finally, many of the knowledge problems are cultural. People are incentivised to rush on to the next job rather than to spend time reflecting on lessons, no matter how important. Source: Why you can’t solve knowledge problems with information tools alone | Knoco Stories
I love this, and along with this post about the joy of watching films in black and white, led to me starting a new art project.
The point of SOFA club is to start as many things as possible as you have the ability, interest, and capacity to, with no regard or goal whatsoever for finishing those projects.
[…]
You can be finished with your project whenever you decide to be done with it. And “done” can mean anything you want it to be. Whose standards of completion or perfection are you holding yourself to anyway? Forget about those! Something is done when you say it is. When it’s no longer interesting. When you’ve gotten a sufficient amount of entertainment and experience from it. When you’ve learned enough from it. Whatever, whenever. Done is what you say it is. Source: 🛋 SOFA
In this post, Derek Sivers shares his experience of a panic attack during a scuba diving trip and being calmed down by his instructor. He then subsequently used the same technique to help someone else who wasn’t OK on a later trip.
Pain and suffering are part of the human experience. For anyone ask “why me?” doesn’t make sense. There are those who dissimulate and those who don’t, but underneath it all there is hardship.
There is less stigma around therapy than there used to be, but I haven’t met anyone (me included!) who hasn’t transformed their life for the better after going through some form of counselling.
There are things in life we think won’t apply to us: Panic. Addiction. Depression.
I thought that was for other people. I thought I wasn’t that type. Why is this happening to me?
But I learned so much empathy that day. These things that only seem to happen to other people can happen to me. We’re not so different. It helps me recognize it in others, and be most helpful by remembering that feeling.
I imagine this is why people, who have been through really hard times, become counselors.
That day also reinforced the power of imitation. My teacher calmed me down so well that it was best to just imitate him. Source: scuba, panic, empathy | Derek Sivers
What I’ve learned over the years from my own experience is that what one person calls a “waste of time” is the complete opposite for someone else. It also has a temporal/timing element to it, as well, I’d argue.
For example, I spent an inordinate amount of time on Twitter between 2007 and 2012, but this paid off massively in terms of my career. I learned a lot and made really valuable connections in the process. My wife thought it was a waste of my time. These days, it absolutely would be.
In this post, the author reflects on why they “waste time” and look at different reasons as well as various ways they’ve sought to combat it. As someone who’s been through therapy, I’d suggest that there’s always something below the surface that needs a skilled professional to draw out.
That’s what seems missing here.
This post is only slightly adapted from my personal notes, so excuse the lack of structure; I didn’t want to try to twist this jumble of thoughts into a narrative. Source: Scattered Thoughts on Why I Waste My Own Time | Just a blog
Image: CC BY mysza831
While I’m not a fan of Nicholas Carr’s approach to technology (“is Google making us stupid?") I do have sympathy with Cal Newport’s more nuanced and considered approach.
Writing in The New Yorker, Newport considers whether we should be allowing teenagers to use social media at all. By this, he doesn’t mean the ‘social internet’, which I explore further in this post.
Our son turns 15 soon and while we’ve grudgingly allowed him to use WhatsApp (I don’t use any Facebook Meta products) he isn’t allowed an Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok account. Digital parenting is a thing.
[…]
My wife and I were talking about lockdowns yesterday given that we’re due to be travelling to the Netherlands next month and they’ve announced a partial lockdown. I can’t imagine something similar would be accepted in the UK — by which I mean it would probably be difficult to enforce.
Austria are imposing a nationwide lockdown for unvaccinated people. This sounds like a good solution for those vaccinated, but (a) there’s non-conspiracy reasons why people aren’t vaccinated, and (b) whatever means are used to prove vaccinated will be instantly forged.
It’s a problem, for sure, how to protect the freedoms of everyone.
[…]
“A lockdown for the unvaccinated means one cannot leave one’s home unless one is going to work, shopping (for essentials), stretching one’s legs – exactly what we all had to suffer through in 2020,” Schallenberg said earlier, according to Reuters.
The lockdown for the unvaccinated has already been formally approved in Upper Austria, where restrictions have also been announced for the entire population. This includes a legal requirement to wear an FFP2 mask in all indoor public places and a ban on events for 3 weeks.
[…]
However, questions have been raised about the feasibility of a lockdown which applies to only a part of the population. “We don’t live in a police state and we can’t and don’t want to check every street corner,” Schallenberg said. Source: Austria to declare nationwide lockdown for unvaccinated people | BNO News
As a gamer, I grow frustrated with people who don’t consider games to be an art form and vehicle for stories comparable with other cultural pursuits.
Take for example one of the biggest games of this year, the recently released Battlefield 2042. Not only is it a technical and cultural milestone, but it presents a plausible timeline for how things could go given our current trajectory: climate, migration, wars, you name it.
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
Source: The World of 2042 | Electronic Arts
I based a good deal of Truth, Lies, and Digital Fluency, a talk I gave in NYC in December 2019, on the work of Shoshana Zuboff. Writing in The New York Times, she starts to get a bit more practical as to what we do about surveillance capitalism.
As Zuboff points out, Big Tech didn’t set out to cause the harms it has any more than fossil fuel companies set out to destroy the earth. The problem is that they are following economic incentives. They’ve found a metaphorical goldmine in hoovering up and selling personal data to advertisers.
Legislating for that core issue looks like it could be more fruitful in terms of long-term consequences. Other calls like “breaking up Big Tech” are the equivalent of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
[…]
We can’t rid ourselves of later-stage social harms unless we outlaw their foundational economic causes. This means we move beyond the current focus on downstream issues such as content moderation and policing illegal content. Such “remedies” only treat the symptoms without challenging the illegitimacy of the human data extraction that funds private control over society’s information spaces. Similarly, structural solutions like “breaking up” the tech giants may be valuable in some cases, but they will not affect the underlying economic operations of surveillance capitalism.
I subscribed to Laura Olin’s newsletter recently, and the first issue I received mentioned how the late Dave Graeber “liked to… write propped up in the bathtub or lying on the floor; that way, it didn’t feel like work”.
She also links to another newsletter issue by Kate McKean, which I quote below, about just getting on with things, keeping the momentum going, and not getting stuck with details. It reminds me of my collaborations this week (in a good way!)
Image: CC BY-NC-ND Alan Bloom
It might not be too much of a stretch to describe Edward Snowden as a hero of mine. I’m not sure what he’s still doing in Russia, but the moral conviction it took to do what he did is staggering.
He writes in exile through a newsletter which is well worth subscribing to. In his most recent missive, he talks about lacking what he calls “origination energy”. On a much smaller level and more insignificant level, I lack this too — especially at this time of year.
So as the young people say, I feel seen.
The endless stream of events that the world provides to remark upon has the tendency to take on an almost physical weight, and robs me of what I can only describe as origination energy: the creative spark that empowers us not simply to do something, but to do something new. Without it, even the best of what I can produce feels derivative and workmanlike—good enough for government, perhaps, but not good enough for you.
I suspect you may know a similar struggle—you can tell me how you fight it below, if you like—but my only means for overcoming it is an aimless wandering in search of the unknown catalyst that might help me to refill my emptied well. Where once I might have had a good chance of walking away inspired by the empathy I felt while watching a sad, sad film, achieving such inspiration feels harder now, somehow. I have to search farther, and wander longer, across centuries of painting and music until at last, when passing by a dumpster, yesterday’s internet comment might suddenly pop into my head and blossom there, as if a poem. The thing—the artifact itself—doesn’t matter, so much as what it does for me—it enlivens me.
This, to me, is art. Source: Cultural Revolutions | Edward Snowden
Image CC BY-NC-ND: Antonio Marín Segovia
Austin Kleon is famous for his book Show Your Work, something that our co-op references from time to time, as it backs up our belief in working openly.
However, as Kleon points out in this post, it doesn’t mean you need to livestream your creative process! For me, this is another example of the tension between being able to be a privacy advocate at the same time as a believer in sharing your work freely and openly.
The danger of sharing online is this ambient buildup of a feeling of being surveilled.
The feeling of being watched, or about to be watched.
You have to disconnect from that long enough to connect with yourself and what you’re working on. Source: You can’t create under surveillance | Austin Kleon
I can’t argue with every anti-vaxxer and climate denialist, but I can debate a few on my timeline. And this xkcd is another useful thing to point towards when they talk about how climate change is nothing new…
Source: xkcd: Earth Temperature Timeline
John Naughton writes notes that we need to describe a fourth kind of power alongside compelling us to do something, stopping us from doing something, or shaping the way we think.
“Platform power” is one possibility. The tech giants all possess it to a greater or lesser degree. In Apple’s case, for example, it owns and controls two important platforms – ie, software systems on which other agents can build businesses: they are the operating systems on which its devices run and its app store, which decides what apps are allowed on Apple devices. Google owns several platforms – a search engine and its associated advertising marketplace, the Android mobile operating system, YouTube and Google cloud services. Facebook (whose holding company is now rebranded as Meta) also owns several – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; Twitter owns, er, Twitter; Amazon owns its marketplace and cloud services; and Microsoft owns the Windows/Office platform and a fast-growing cloud service, Azure. Source: How can we tame the tech giants now that they control society’s infrastructure? | The Guardian
Anyone who follows football will perhaps be disappointed yet unsurprised that racism and sexism continue to be part of the beautiful game.
This study is clever in the way that it shows that those watching football matches use coded language and are biased against women. Hopefully, it will help all of us figure out better ways forward.
(I actually really enjoy watching women’s football with my family!)
[…]
The athleticism flip-flop offers a new kind of evidence of a prejudice that affects how Black players of every nationality are perceived. For decades, researchers have documented media stereotypes of African players as “‘powerful,’ ‘big-thighed,’ ‘lithe of body,’ ‘big,’ ‘explosive,’ and like ‘lightning,’ attributes that were to be contrasted with ‘the know-how that England possess.’” As Belgian forward Romelu Lukaku, who is Black, told The New York Times, “It is never about my skill when I am compared to other strikers.” Now, for the first time, researchers have a way to isolate how race influences direct perceptions of the game. Interestingly, they also looked at gender as well as race:
People who watched the broadcasts said that the men’s game was “higher quality” by a 57 percent to 43 percent margin. Those who saw the renders with genderless stick figures preferred the women’s match, 59 percent to 41 percent. The results weren’t statistically significant across a small sample of 105 mostly male respondents, but Pleuler believes the line of research is promising. “I think these results are suggestive that your average soccer fan can’t tell the difference between something that does have a large investment level and the women’s game, which does not,” he said. Source: Soccer Looks Different When You Can’t See Who’s Playing | FiveThirtyEight
This isn’t an easy article to cite, mainly because I want to quote both it and some commentary by Andrew Curry. The original article is paywalled, so I’m going to rely on Curry’s quotations.
I’m particularly interested in this because I’m one of the oldest Millennials (I was born nine days before the end of 1980). There’s something about my generation whereby we’re just not going to take that Boomer shit any more.
One of the elements of this is that it is Millennials who are disproportionately more likely to quit. One might say, ‘what are these young people thinking of?’, were it not for the fact that the oldest Millennials are 41 this year; half a lifetime in, in other words.
The writer Erin Lowry, who has written multiple books on Millennials, and is a Millennial herself, is having none of it. In a (partly gated) short column in Bloomberg, she suggests instead that the games’s up for the version of work that has been normalised in the last two decades. Curry quotes Lowry as saying:
[…]
We can theorize that this burnout comes from the increasingly blurred boundaries between being on and off the clock. From being conditioned to believe that appearing “always available” is the hallmark of a promotable employee. From jobs that once required a high school diploma suddenly demanding a bachelor’s degree, forcing young people to get mired in never-before-seen levels of student loan debt. Source: Work | Ancestors | Just Two Things
I recognise that this is rather niche, but as a fan of Google Stadia, this is great to see. For some reason, there’s a lot of people who seem to want cloud gaming… not to work?
The thing is that it’s here, working, and pretty awesome. Yes, there’s rough edges at times, but the technology and culture around it is a lot less mature than the more traditional model.
AT&T also adds that you can stream Arkham Knight at up to 1080p and 60fps, which is the same performance you’ll get if you use Stadia for free. Paid Stadia Pro subscribers have the ability to stream up to 4K at 60fps, for which AT&T doesn’t offer an option. On the Arkham Knight page, AT&T notes that the game will be “available for a limited time.”
We also asked AT&T whether the company would be working on similar Stadia-powered games in the future or if it planned on establishing a game streaming service for customers. AT&T wasn’t able to share any additional details, but its dip into Stadia technology may open the door for other companies to follow suit. Source: AT&T is white-labeling Google Stadia to give you free Batman game streaming | The Verge
This post is ostensibly about marketing a game studio, but it has wider lessons for all kinds of creators. Long story short? Don’t get seduced by ‘exposure’ but instead spend your time directing people towards places that you own and control.
The metaphors and graphics used are lovely, so be sure to click through and read it in its entirety!
Goal here: You want to grow from this little tiny hamlet to a giant castle. You also want a bunch of people in your kingdom living there (aka playing your games), and paying you taxes (buying your games) and telling you how brilliant of a leader you are (fan mail, fan art) and enjoying the company of your kingdom’s fellow citizens (community engagement).
[…]
It is hard to make people leave a social media site. But you need to work hard at it.
With every single person who enters your castle in a foreign land, tell them “welcome, yes my castle is nice here, but did you know I do better stuff over there in that Kingdom across the sea?”
Always be working to get people over to your land. Source: Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms | How To Market A Game
The amount of nostalgia that this article gave me was incredible. I have spent more time with the Championship Manager series of games (now Football Manager) than any game. Even FIFA.
Perhaps because it was a formative period in my life, but Championship Manager 93 and Championship Manager Italia were perhaps may favourite. I can remember playing one of them on the bus to a football tournament in Blackpool on my Dad’s laptop (with a monochrome screen!)
Theoretically, you can play these games via archive.org. But the links weren’t working for me when I tried them…
[…]
I recently downloaded Championship Manager 93 on my laptop. It runs slightly more quickly on a Mac. I took Cambridge United to the top of the Premier League. A front line of Darrell Powell, Dominic Iorfa and Nick Barmby were unstoppable. Source: No passing, no training, seven discs: the joys of 90s football gaming | The Guardian
I’ve worked from home for almost a decade now and still find posts like this incredibly instructive. Not only does Olivier Lacan go through gear, but also how to set it up.
In addition, there’s a few useful tips in here about remote etiquette and when to jump on a call instead of continuing a back-and-forth via text.
[…]
The one-stop-shop doesn’t exist quite yet, but I can tell you from experience that you can already communicate remotely with higher fidelity than the majority of office workers through the world did even before the pandemic. While your three-dimensional presence will never be replaceable, it’s possible for two-way communication to have an unprecendented amount of subtlety.
[…]
It’s the responsibility of employers to deploy the kind of budgets already allocated toward in-office communication to remote work equipment. It’s also the role of folks like me (and you) to help educate IT departments and business leaders on hardware solutions that already exist today.
It has become quite absurd to argue that remoteness has to mean becoming a less visible and valued contributor to your organization. I hope this post can help you convince anyone who might still believe that communicating remotely still has to be a pain. Source: High Fidelity Remote Communication | Olivier Lacan
This article focuses on the work of Dashun Wang, an economist at Northwestern University, who has looked at ‘hot streaks’ in the careers of regular people.
It comes down, apparently, to exploring areas and then exploiting them. I would translate that into British English as “pissing around with stuff that looks interesting until you find a use for it”.
Wang’s analysis—which used a broader measure of productivity for a much larger group of people—didn’t find anything special about the productivity of middle-aged people. Instead, hot streaks were equally likely to happen among young, mid-career, and late-career artists and scientists. Other theories fell flat too. Maybe, he thought, getting hot is a numbers game, and hot streaks happen when you produce the most work. Or maybe extremely successful work periods are all about focusing on one specific type of art or scientific discipline—as the 10,000-hours-of-practice rule popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers suggests. Or maybe hot streaks are more about who else we’re working with, and we’re most successful when we cozy up to superstars in our domain. But no explanation fit the data set.
Until this year. This summer, Wang and his co-authors published their first grand theory of the origin of hot streaks. It’s a complicated idea that comes down to three words: Explore, then exploit. Source: Hot Streaks in Your Career Don’t Happen by Accident | The Atlantic
Maybe this is nothing. Maybe it’s something. But when an Open Source messaging app claims to need to make part of it closed source, maybe there’s something going on?
There are plenty of Open Souce solutions for email and commenting systems, so Free and Open Source (FLOSS) enthusiasts are entirely justified in wondering: is this a government backdoor?
I find comparative analysis of working patterns absolutely fascinating. What counts as work? What does it mean to be productive? What is the context around work?
While I can’t remember where I came across it, this analysis takes an eight-century long view on working hours. It turns out that these days most of us work more than medieval peasants did…
[…]
The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official – that is, church – holidays included not only long “vacations” at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales – to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year. Source: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today’s
COP26 has started, and it’s easy to be cynical and defeatist about the whole thing. But this article in The Guardian offers some glimmers of hope, somewhat in the vein of the excellent Future Crunch newsletter.
Oh this is fascinating. Get to your forties and everyone seems to be interested in marathons, triathlons, and putting on lycra to go and cycle somewhere.
This article explains that this is a function not only of access to the required time and money, but is a deep-seated need for those who are doing well out of the capitalist system.
[…]
There are a handful of obvious reasons the vast majority of endurance athletes are employed, educated, and financially secure. As stated, the ability to train and compete demands that one has time, money, access to facilities, and a safe space to practice, says William Bridel, a professor at the University of Calgary who studies the sociocultural aspects of sport. “The cost of equipment, race entry fees, and travel to events works to exclude lower socioeconomic status individuals,” he says, adding that those in a higher socioeconomic bracket tend to have nine-to-five jobs that provide some freedom to, for example, train before or after work or even at at lunch. “Almost all of the non-elite Ironman athletes who I’ve interviewed for my research had what would be considered white-collar jobs and commented on the flexibility this provided,” says Bridel.
[…]
Even so, there are myriad ways for relatively comfortable middle-to-upper-class individuals to spend their time and money. What is it about the voluntary suffering of endurance sports that attracts them?
This is a question sociologists are just beginning to unpack. One hypothesis is that endurance sports offer something that most modern-day knowledge economy jobs do not: the chance to pursue a clear and measurable goal with a direct line back to the work they have put in. In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, philosopher Matthew Crawford writes that “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics,” most knowledge economy jobs suffer from “a lack of objective standards.”
[…]
Another reason white-collar workers are flocking to endurance sports has to do with the sheer physicality involved. For a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research this past February, a group of international researchers set out to understand why people with desk jobs are attracted to grueling athletic events. They interviewed 26 Tough Mudder participants and read online forums dedicated to obstacle course racing. What emerged was a resounding theme: the pursuit of pain.
“By flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness,” write the researchers. “When leaving marks and wounds, pain helps consumers create the story of a fulfilled life. In a context of decreased physicality, [obstacle course races] play a major role in selling pain to the saturated selves of knowledge workers, who use pain as a way to simultaneously escape reflexivity and craft their life narrative.” The pursuit of pain has become so common among well-to-do endurance athletes that scientific articles have been written about what researchers are calling “white-collar rhabdomyolysis,” referring to a condition in which extreme exercise causes kidney damage. Source: Why Do Rich People Love Endurance Sports? - Outside Online
‘Carbon offsetting’ is just a way of the western middle classes assuaging their climate guilt. We can do better by thinking holistically.
The study is among the most comprehensive analyses of restoration projects to date, but it’s just one example in a litany of failed campaigns that call into question the value of big tree-planting initiatives. Often, the allure of bold targets obscures the challenges involved in seeing them through, and the underlying forces that destroy ecosystems in the first place.
Instead of focusing on planting huge numbers of trees, experts told Vox, we should focus on growing trees for the long haul, protecting and restoring ecosystems beyond just forests, and empowering the local communities that are best positioned to care for them. Source: Climate change: How to plant trillions of trees without hurting people and the planet | Vox
Usually, guides to securing your digital life are very introductory and basic. This one from Ars Technica, however, is a bit more advanced. I particularly appreciate the advice to use authenticator apps for 2FA.
Remember, if it’s inconvenient for you it’s probably orders of magnitude more inconvenient for would-be attackers. To get into one of my cryptocurrency accounts, for example, I’ve set it so I need a password and three other forms of authentication.
Overkill? Probably. But it dramatically reduces the likelihood that someone else will make off with my meme stocks…
This is an example of a situation where “normal” risk mitigation measures don’t stack up. In this case, I was targeted because I had a verified account. You don’t necessarily have to be a celebrity to be targeted by an attacker (I certainly don’t think of myself as one)—you just need to have some information leaked that makes you a tempting target.
For example, earlier I mentioned that 2FA based on text messages is easier to bypass than app-based 2FA. One targeted scam we see frequently in the security world is SIM cloning—where an attacker convinces a mobile provider to send a new SIM card for an existing phone number and uses the new SIM to hijack the number. If you’re using SMS-based 2FA, a quick clone of your mobile number means that an attacker now receives all your two-factor codes.
Additionally, weaknesses in the way SMS messages are routed have been used in the past to send them to places they shouldn’t go. Until earlier this year, some services could hijack text messages, and all that was required was the destination phone number and $16. And there are still flaws in Signaling System 7 (SS7), a key telephone network protocol, that can result in text message rerouting if abused. Source: Securing your digital life, part two: The bigger picture—and special circumstances | Ars Technica
I’m sharing this mainly for the blackout poetry, but I also appreciate the quotation from Nabakov that Austin Kleon shares in this post.
As I explained in my checking out of therapy post, you can “paint yourself into a rather unhelpful corner by being the person everyone else expects you to be”. Taking off that mask can be liberating.
Earlier this week, in a soon-to-be released episode of the Tao of WAO podcast, we were talking about the benefits and pitfalls of NGOs like Greenpeace partnering with influencers. The upside? Engaging with communities that would otherwise be hard-to-reach. The downside? Influencers can be unpredictable.
It’s somewhat inevitable, therefore, that “brand-safe” fictional influencers would emerge. As detailed in this article, not only are teams of writers creating metaverses in which several characters exist, but they’re using machine learning to allow fans/followers to “interact”.
The boundary between the real and fictional is only going to get more blurred.
On the other hand, there’s something sort of darkly refreshing about an influencer “openly” being created by a room of professional writers whose job is to create the most likable and interesting social media users possible. Influencers already have to walk the delicate line between aspirational and inauthentic, to attract new followers without alienating existing fans, to use their voice for change while remaining “brand-safe.” The job has always been a performance; it’s just that now that performance can be convincingly replicated by a team of writers and a willing actor. Source: What’s the deal with fictional influencers? | Vox
I can’t really remember what life was like before having children. Becoming a parent changes you in ways you can’t describe to non-parents.
Similarly, if we tried to go back in time and explain how the pandemic has changed us, how we’re more susceptible to burnout, less up for meeting with other people, it would be almost impossible to do.
One term that might be useful, however, is ‘psychological hibernation’ — as this article explains.
In 2018, a group of psychologists in the Antarctic published a report that may help us understand our current collective exhaustion. The researchers found that the emotional capacity of people who had relocated to the end of the world had been significantly reduced in the time they had been there; participants living in the Antarctic reported feeling duller than usual and less lively. They called this condition “psychological hibernation”. And it’s something many of us will be able to relate to now.
“One of the things that we noticed throughout the pandemic is that people started to enter this phase of psychological hibernation,” said Emma Kavanagh, a psychologist specialising in how people deal with the aftermath of disasters. “Where there’s not many sounds or people or different experiences, it doesn’t require the brain to work at quite the same level. So what you find is that people felt emotionally like everything had just been dialled back. It looks a lot like burnout, symptom wise.” Kavanagh continued: “I think that happened to us all in lockdown, and we are now struggling to adapt to higher levels of stimulus.” Source: The great Covid social burnout: why are we so exhausted? | New Statesman
I mentioned on Twitter last week how I noticed that I keep getting recommended stories about Nigel Farage and from outlets on the political right wing like The Telegraph.
Lo and behold, Twitter has published findings from its own investigation which found that its algorithms actively promote right wing accounts and news sources. Now I hope it does something about it.
— Tweets about political content from elected officials, regardless of party or whether the party is in power, do see algorithmic amplification when compared to political content on the reverse chronological timeline.
— Group effects did not translate to individual effects. In other words, since party affiliation or ideology is not a factor our systems consider when recommending content, two individuals in the same political party would not necessarily see the same amplification.
— In six out of seven countries — all but Germany — Tweets posted by accounts from the political right receive more algorithmic amplification than the political left when studied as a group.
— Right-leaning news outlets, as defined by the independent organizations listed above, see greater algorithmic amplification on Twitter compared to left-leaning news outlets. However, as highlighted in the paper, these third-party ratings make their own, independent classifications and as such the results of analysis may vary depending on which source is used. Source: Examining algorithmic amplification of political content on Twitter | Twitter blog
It’s an odd metaphor, but the behaviours described in terms of internet communities are definitely something I’ve witnessed in 25 years of being online.
(This post is from 2017 but popped up on Hacker News recently.)
Community forms based off of a common interest, personality, value set, etc. We’ll describe “people who strongly share the interest/personality/value” as Possums: people who like a specific culture. These people have nothing against anybody, they just only feel a strong sense of community from really particular sorts of people, and tend to actively seek out and form niche or cultivated communities. To them, “friendly and welcoming” community is insufficient to give them a sense of belonging, so they have to actively work to create it. Possums tend to (but not always) be the originators of communities.
This community becomes successful and fun
Community starts attracting Otters: People who like most cultures. They can find a way to get along with anybody, they don’t have specific standards, they are widely tolerant. They’re mostly ok with whatever sort of community comes their way, as long as it’s friendly and welcoming. These Otters see the Possum community and happily enter, delighted to find all these fine lovely folk and their interesting subculture.(e.g., in a christian chatroom, otters would be atheists who want to discuss religion; in a rationality chatroom, it would be members who don’t practice rationality but like talking with rationalists)
Community grows to have more and more Otters, as they invite their friends. Communities tend to acquire Otters faster than Possums, because the selectivity of Possums means that only a few of them will gravitate towards the culture, while nearly any Otter will like it. Gradually the community grows diluted until some Otters start entering who don’t share the Possum goals even a little bit – or even start inviting Possum friends with rival goals. (e.g., members who actively dislike rationality practices in the rationality server).
Possums realize the community culture is not what it used to be and not what they wanted, so they try to moderate. The mods might just kick and ban those farthest from community culture, but more frequently they’ll try to dampen the blow and subsequent outrage by using a constitution, laws, and removal process, usually involving voting and way too much discussion.
The Otters like each other, and kicking an Otter makes all of the other Otters members really unhappy. There are long debates about whether or not what the Possum moderator did was the Right Thing and whether the laws or constitution are working correctly or whether they should split off and form their own chat room
The new chat room is formed, usually by Otters. Some of the members join both chats, but the majority are split, as the aforementioned debates generated a lot of hostility
Rinse and repeat— Source: Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums | knowingless
I suppose we should have listened when people told the team I was on at Mozilla time and time again that the name ‘Open Badges’ didn’t work for them. They didn’t seem to get the fact that they could call them anything they liked in their organisations; the important thing was that they aligned with the open standard.
A decade later, and ‘microcredentials’ seems to be one term that’s been adopted, especially towards the formal end of the credentialing spectrum. In this interview, Jackie Pichette, Director of Research and Policy for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, takes a Higher Education-centric look at the landscape.
I may be cynical, but it comes across a lot like “that’s all very well in practice, but what about in theory?"
We landed on an umbrella definition of programs focused on a discrete set of competencies (i.e., skills, knowledge, attributes) that, by virtue of having a narrow focus, require less time to obtain than traditional credentials. We also came up with a typology to show the variation in this definition. For example, microcredentials can be self-paced to accommodate individual schedules, can follow a defined schedule or feature a mix of fixed- and self-paced elements. Source: How Do Microcredentials Stack Up? Part 1 | The EvoLLLution
I’m sharing this article mainly for the genius of the accompanying illustration, although it also does a good job of trying to explain an increasing feeling of English exceptionalism.
Meanwhile, England has become one of the worst places for infections in the world, despite a high degree of vaccination by global standards. Case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths are all rising, and are already much higher than in other western European countries that have kept measures such as indoor mask-wearing compulsory, and where compliance with such rules has remained strong. What does England’s failure to control the virus through “personal responsibility” say about our society?
It’s tempting to start by generalising about national character, and how the supposed individualism of the English has become selfishness after half a century of frequent rightwing government and fragmentation in our lives and culture. There may be some truth in that. But national character is not a very solid concept, weakened by all the differences within countries and all the similarities that span continents. Thanks to globalisation, all European societies have been affected by the same atomising forces. England’s lack of altruism during the pandemic can’t just be blamed on neoliberalism.
Other elements of our recent history may also explain it. England likes to think of itself as a stable country, yet since the 2008 financial crisis it has endured a more protracted period of economic, social and political turmoil than most European countries. The desire to return to some kind of normality may be especially strong here; taking proper anti-Covid precautions would be an acknowledgement that we cannot do that. Source: With Covid infections rising, the Tories are conducting a deadly social experiment | The Guardian
This is a great article about how the internet was going to save us from TV and now we’re looking for something to save us from the internet. What we actually need are stronger and deeper relationships with the people around us — our kith and kin.
This is why famous people as a rule are obsessed with what people say about them and stew and rage and rant about it. I can tell you that a thousand kind words from strangers will bounce off you, while a single harsh criticism will linger. And, if you pay attention, you’ll find all kinds of people—but particularly, quite often, famous people—having public fits on social media, at any time of the day or night. You might find Kevin Durant, one of the greatest basketball players on the planet, possibly in the history of the game—a multimillionaire who is better at the thing he does than almost any other person will ever be at anything—in the D.M.s of some twenty something fan who’s talking trash about his free-agency decisions. Not just once—routinely! And he’s not the only one at all.
There’s no reason, really, for anyone to care about the inner turmoil of the famous. But I’ve come to believe that, in the Internet age, the psychologically destabilizing experience of fame is coming for everyone. Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways. Source: On the Internet, We’re Always Famous | The New Yorker
Venture Capitalists inhabit a slightly different world than the rest of us. This post, for example, paints a picture of a future that makes sense to people deeply enmeshed in Fintech, but not for those of us outside of that bubble.
That being said, there’s a nugget of truth in there about the need for more specific services for particular sectors, rather than relying on generic ones provides by Big Tech.
However, the chances are that those will simply plug in to existing marketplaces (e.g. Google Workplace) rather than strike out on their own. But, what do I know?
Solo workers venturing out on their own need to feel like they can replace the support of a company model. Traditionally, the firm brings three things to support the core craft or product:
I’ve only just discovered the writing of Anne Helen Petersen, via one of the many newsletters and feeds to which I subscribe. I featured her work last week about remote working.
Petersen’s newsletter is called Culture Study and the issue that went out yesterday was incredible. She talks about this time of year — a time I struggle with in particular — and gets right to the heart of the issue.
I’ve learned to take Vitamin D, turn on my SAD light, and to go easy on myself. But there’s always a little voice suggesting that this is how it’s going to be from here on out. So it’s good to hear what other people advise. For Petersen, it’s community involvement.
As distractions fade, you’re forced to sit with your own story of how things are going. Maybe you’d been bullshitting yourself for weeks, for months. It was easy to ignore my bad lunch habits when I was spending most of the day outside. Now it’s just me and my angry stomach and scraping the tub of the hummus container yet again. Or, more seriously: now it’s just me swimming against the familiar tide of burnout, not realizing how far it had already pulled me from shore.
[…]
Is this the part of the pandemic when we’re happy? When we’re angry? When we’re hanging out or pulling back, when we’re hopeful or dismayed, when we’re making plans or canceling them? The calendar moves forward but we’re stuck. In old patterns, in old understandings of how work and our families and the world should be. That’s the feeling of regression, I think. It’s not that we’re losing ground. It’s that we were too hopeful about having gained it. Source: What’s That Feeling? Oh, It’s Fall Regression | Culture Study
I agree with what Simon Jenkins is saying here about focusing on the ‘reduce’ part of sustainable travel. However, it does sound a bit like victim-blaming to say that people outside of London travel mainly by car.
We travel primarily by car because of the lack of other options. Infrastructure is important, including outside of our capital city.
One constructive outcome of the Covid pandemic has been to radically revise the concept of a “journey to work”. Current predictions are that “hybrid” home-working may rise by as much as 20%, with consequent cuts in commuting travel. Rail use this month remains stubbornly at just 65% of its pre-lockdown level. Office blocks in city centres are still half-empty. Covid plus the digital revolution have at last liberated the rigid geography of labour.
Climate-sensitive transport policy should capitalise on this change. It should not pander to distance travel in any mode but discourage it. Fuel taxes are good. Road pricing is good. So are home-working, Zoom-meeting (however ghastly for some), staycationing, local high-street shopping, protecting local amenities and guarding all forms of communal activity. Source: Train or plane? The climate crisis is forcing us to rethink all long-distance travel | The Guardian
Same idea, new name: there’s nothing new about the idea of prioritising the amount of time and agency you have over the amount of money you make.
It’s just that, after the pandemic, more people have realised that chasing money is a fool’s errand. So, whatever you call it, putting your own wellbeing before the treadmill of work and career is always a smart move.
And the pandemic has created a new cohort of time millionaires. The UK and the US are currently in the grip of a workforce crisis. One recent survey found that more than 56% of unemployed people were not actively looking for a new job. Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that many people are not returning to their pre-pandemic jobs, or if they are, they are requesting to work from home, clawing back all those hours previously lost to commuting. Source: Time millionaires: meet the people pursuing the pleasure of leisure | The Guardian
Terence Eden opened a new private browsing window and started typing “https…” and received the results of lots of different sites.
He uses this to surmise, and I think he’s probably correct, that users conflate search bars and address bars. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve been one and the same thing in browsers for years now.
Perhaps more worrying is that there’s a whole generation of students who don’t know what a file system structure is…
Yes, yes, and yes. I agree wholeheartedly with this view that places human flourishing above work.
In recent years, the public has become more aware of conditions in warehouses and the gig economy. Yet we have relied on inventory pickers and delivery drivers ever more during the pandemic. Maybe compassion can lead us to realize we don’t need instant delivery of everything and that workers bear the often-invisible cost of our cheap meat and oil.
The vision of less work must also encompass more leisure. For a time the pandemic took away countless activities, from dinner parties and concerts to in-person civic meetings and religious worship. Once they can be enjoyed safely, we ought to reclaim them as what life is primarily about, where we are fully ourselves and aspire to transcendence.
Leisure is what we do for its own sake. It serves no higher end. Source: Returning to the Office and the Future of Work | The New York Times
It’s entirely unsurprising that governments should seek to use the pandemic as cover for hoovering up data about its citizens. However, it’s up to us to resist this.
[…]
Dr Nicola Byrne also warned that emergency powers brought in to allow the sharing of data to help tackle the spread of Covid-19 could not run on indefinitely after they were extended to March 2022.
Dr Byrne, 46, who has had a 20-year career in mental health, also warned against the lack of regulation over the way companies were collecting, storing and sharing patient data via health apps.
She told The Independent she had raised concerns with the government over clauses in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill which is going through the House of Lords later this month.
The legislation could impose a duty on NHS bodies to disclose private patient data to police to prevent serious violence and crucially sets aside a duty of confidentiality on clinicians collecting information when providing care.
Dr Byrne said doing so could “erode trust and confidence, and deter people from sharing information and even from presenting for clinical care”.
She added that it was not clear what exact information would be covered by the bill: “The case isn’t made as to why that is necessary. These things need to be debated openly and in public.” Source: Plans to hand over NHS data to police sparks warning from government adviser | The Independent
A really handy TED talk focusing on ‘precrastinators’ (with whom I definitely identify) and how they differ from procrastinators and what Grant calls ‘originals’ in terms of creativity.
(I always watch these kinds of things at 1.5x speed, but Adam Grant already talks quickly!)
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
Source: The surprising habits of original thinkers | Adam Grant
This piece by Anne Helen Petersen is so good about the return to work. It’s ostensibly about US universities, but is so much widely applicable.
As I’ve said to several people over the past few weeks, the idea of needing staff to be in a physical office most of the time for ‘serendipitous interactions’ is ridiculous. Working openly allows for much greater serendipity surface than any forced physical co-location might achieve.
For some, the office is just a quick walk or bike ride away. But for many, coming into the office requires a distinctly unromantic commute. It means cobbling together childcare plans, particularly with the nationwide bus driver shortages and school quarantine regulations after illness or a potential exposure. It means paying for parking, and packing or paying for their lunches, and handing over anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours of their day. They are enduring the worst parts of a “traditional” job, only to go into the office and essentially work remote, with worse conditions and fewer amenities (and, in many cases, less comfort) than they had at home. It’s the worst of both work worlds.
[…]
The university might seem like a weird example of an “office,” but it’s a pretty vivid illustration of one. You have leadership who are obsessed with image, cost cutting, and often deeply out of touch with the day-to-day operations of the organization (administration); a group of “creatives” (tenured faculty) who form the outward core of the organization and thus have significant self-import but dwindling power; full-time employees of various levels who are fundamental to the operation of the organization and chronically under-appreciated (staff) ; an underclass of contingent and contract workers who perform similar jobs to full-time employees but for less pay, fewer protections, less job security, and are held in far less esteem (grad students, adjuncts, and sub-contracted staff, including building, maintenance, food service, security). And then there’s the all-important customer, whose imagined needs, preferences, whims, demands, and supply of capital serve are the axis around which the rest of the organization rotates (students and their parents). Source: The Worst of Both Work Worlds | Culture Study
There has been a lot written and recorded already about Newcastle United, my geographically-closest Premier League football team, and the rival of the team I actually support (Sunderland).
I am certainly sympathetic to the idea that individual people should live their values. But there has to be a line drawn somewhere. For example, I really like the music of the artist Morrissey, yet I think some of his politics and other views are distasteful and problematic.
Likewise, when the sovereign wealth fund of a foreign power provides your football team with untold riches, why shouldn’t you celebrate? While I’d love to live in a world where fans own football clubs (see AFC Wimbledon) as the article points out, this purchase needs to be placed in a wider narrative around Brexit and widening inequalities in society.
And yet, few in Newcastle seem to care. I mean, why should they? Their rivals in the English Premier League are already owned by some pretty unpleasant regimes or people: Manchester City is controlled by Abu Dhabi, and Chelsea by a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin. What’s the point in turning down someone’s money if nobody else is? The fixer who facilitated the Saudi takeover has, incredibly, insisted that the Saudi state was not taking over Newcastle’s soccer club, but rather its sovereign wealth fund, which, the fixer said, genuinely cared about human rights. Both, of course, are run by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Beyond this cynical piece of performance art, however, the Newcastle United sale is emblematic of something far more fundamental and depressing about the state of Britain. Source: Britain’s Distasteful Soccer Sellout | The Atlantic
I can’t remember the last time I used cash. Or rather, I can (for my son’s haircut) because it was so unusual; it’s been about 18 months since my default wasn’t paying via the Google Pay app on my smartphone.
As a result, and because I also have played around with buying, selling, and holding cryptocurrencies, that a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) would be a benign thing. Sadly, as Edward Snowden explains, they really are not. His latest article is well worth a read in its entirety.
Neither is a Central Bank Digital Currency a State-level embrace of cryptocurrency—at least not of cryptocurrency as pretty much everyone in the world who uses it currently understands it.
Instead, a CBDC is something closer to being a perversion of cryptocurrency, or at least of the founding principles and protocols of cryptocurrency—a cryptofascist currency, an evil twin entered into the ledgers on Opposite Day, expressly designed to deny its users the basic ownership of their money and to install the State at the mediating center of every transaction. Source: Your Money and Your Life - by Edward Snowden - Continuing Ed — with Edward Snowden
My wife flew down to a work meetup (and to see her family) last week. She got the train back. The flight was about £40, and the train about five times that.
At around seven hours, that journey would have been exempt from these plans, but it’s illustrative of how passengers are currently economically encouraged to destroy the environment.
Mandatory emissions labels on tickets and a frequent flyer levy should also be introduced, the charity said.
The demands came before the 27 October budget, in which the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, may decide to cut taxes on domestic flights in response to pressure from the aviation industry, a possibility mooted by the prime minister earlier this year. Such a move could, however, prove an embarrassment a week before the UK hosts the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow.
[…]
Paul Tuohy, the chief executive of CBT said: “Cheap domestic flights might seem a good deal when you buy them, but they are a climate disaster, generating seven times more harmful greenhouse emissions than the equivalent train journey.
“Making the train cheaper will boost passenger numbers and help reduce emissions from aviation, but any cut to air passenger duty – coupled with a rise in rail fares in January – will send the wrong message about how the government wants people to travel and mean more people choosing to fly.” Source: Ban UK domestic flights and subsidise rail travel, urges transport charity | The Guardian
My wife flew down to a work meetup (and to see her family) last week. She got the train back. The flight was about £40, and the train about five times that.
At around seven hours, that journey would have been exempt from these plans, but it’s illustrative of how passengers are currently economically encouraged to destroy the environment.
Mandatory emissions labels on tickets and a frequent flyer levy should also be introduced, the charity said.
The demands came before the 27 October budget, in which the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, may decide to cut taxes on domestic flights in response to pressure from the aviation industry, a possibility mooted by the prime minister earlier this year. Such a move could, however, prove an embarrassment a week before the UK hosts the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow.
[…]
Paul Tuohy, the chief executive of CBT said: “Cheap domestic flights might seem a good deal when you buy them, but they are a climate disaster, generating seven times more harmful greenhouse emissions than the equivalent train journey.
“Making the train cheaper will boost passenger numbers and help reduce emissions from aviation, but any cut to air passenger duty – coupled with a rise in rail fares in January – will send the wrong message about how the government wants people to travel and mean more people choosing to fly.” Source: Ban UK domestic flights and subsidise rail travel, urges transport charity | The Guardian
One of the huge benefits of the pandemic has been that it’s allowed people to reflect on their lives. And many people, it seems, realised that their jobs (or work in general) makes them unhappy.
Both might be true. But if low wages were all that’s at play, we would expect to see reluctant workers at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and content workers at the top. Instead, there are murmurs of dissent at every rung, including from the inner sanctums of Goldman Sachs, where salaries for investment bankers start at $150,000. According to a leaked internal survey, entry-level analysts at the investment bank report they’re facing “inhumane” conditions, working an average of 98 hours a week, forgoing showers and sleep. “I’ve been through foster care,” said one respondent. “This is arguably worse.” Source: Lying Flat': Tired Workers Are Opting Out of Careers and Capitalism | The New York Times
Austin Kleon summarises Bill O’Hanlon’s idea around there being ‘four energies’ that writers can dig into. They may need translating for a British audience (‘pissed’ means something different over here…) but I like it as an organising idea.
Related: Buster Benson’s ‘Seven Modes (for seven heads)’ from his seminal post Live like a hydra.
The last time I was in LA, I hired a Dodge Charger and navigated the huge freeways meeting a client and then visiting a friend. I remember going for a fabled In-N-Out burger and seeing the sky turn orange due to Californian wildfires.
I took a photo, ate my burger, and got back in the car. It’s amazing how quickly we normalise quite extreme things in our lives. Since then, my understanding, awareness, and action around the climate emergency has changed dramatically. But that’s taken five years, and we haven’t got time for everyone to come to their own epiphany; the world is on fire.
I think this is why there haven’t been more successful films about climate change. We love movies about existential threats—mainly aliens—but in those stories individual characters make decisions to deal with the crisis within a couple of weeks. One of the few blockbuster films to deal directly with climate change, The Day After Tomorrow, imagined an Ice Age apocalypse that settles over Earth in a matter of days. Climate scientists rightfully criticized the movie, but I think it says something profound about the climate problem: Unless we unreasonably turn up the speed dial, we are incapable of fitting climate change into the kind of narrative that human beings are used to processing.
And yet, here we are, causing one of the fastest shifts the planet has ever experienced. The sheer pace of change playing out right now is making it harder for us to maintain our myth of a stable planet. The stability fantasy is beginning to crumble. Source: The Stability Fantasy | Orion Magazine
Well, this is concerning. Especially given governments' love for authoritarian technologies and copying one another’s surveillance practices.
From vast numbers of CCTV cameras to trials of lampposts kitted out with facial recognition tech, Singapore is seeing an explosion of tools to track its inhabitants.
[…]
Some useful advice from Ed Batista about the difference between ‘good decision-making’ and ‘making the right decision’.
So while I support using available data to rank our options in some rough sense, ultimately we’re best served by avoiding paralysis-by-analysis and moving forward by:
Having travelled here, there, and everywhere by air for both personal and professional business over the last decade, it took me too long to realise the scale of the climate emergency.
When I did, I looked into climate offsets, but found that they’re hugely problematic, and often a scam. That’s why I’m not flying any more. It’s good to hear Greenpeace’s Executive Director Jennifer Morgan come out so strongly against them, and put pressure back on the fossil fuel industry.
The model allows polluting companies to offset their emissions by buying credits from projects that reduce or avoid the release of climate-warming CO2 elsewhere, such as mass tree plantings or solar power farms - which could be worth $50 billion by 2030 according to a task force created to scale up the market.
Environmental advocates such as Greenpeace say this is allowing big emitters like oil majors to put off cutting their own emissions and avoid divesting from hydrocarbons, a primary source of greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
“There’s no time for offsets. We are in a climate emergency and we need phasing out of fossil fuels,” Greenpeace’s Executive Director Jennifer Morgan said at the Reuters Impact conference.
She said one issue with planting trees as offsets was that it takes 20 years for trees to grow and offset emissions happening right now. In the interim wildfires could destroy the chance of reductions."
These offsetting schemes … are pure ‘greenwash’ so that the companies, oil companies, can continue to do what they’ve been doing and make a profit," she said. Source: Greenpeace calls for end to carbon offsets | Reuters
This is an interesting article from UC Berkley’s Greater Good Magazine based on journalist Jennifer Moss' new book The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It. It not only talks about organisational factors, but personality types as well.
2. Perceived lack of control. Studies show that autonomy at work is important for well-being, and being micromanaged is particularly de-motivating to employees. Yet many employers fall back on watching their employees’ every move, controlling their work schedule, or punishing them for missteps.
3. Lack of reward or recognition. Paying someone what they are worth is an important way to reward them for their work. But so is communicating to people that their efforts matter.
4. Poor relationships. Having a sense of belonging is necessary for mental health and well-being. This is true at work as much as it is in life. When people feel part of a community, they are more likely to thrive. As a Gallup poll found, having social connections at work is important. “Employees who have best friends at work identify significantly higher levels of healthy stress management, even though they experience the same levels of stress,” the authors write.
5. Lack of fairness. Unfair treatment includes “bias, favoritism, mistreatment by a coworker or supervisor, and unfair compensation and/or corporate policies,” writes Moss. When people are being treated unjustly, they are likely to burn out and need more sick time.
6. Values mismatch. “Hiring someone whose values and goals do not align with the values and goals of the organization’s culture may result in lower job satisfaction and negatively impact mental health,” writes Moss. It’s likely that someone who doesn’t share in the organization’s mission will be unhappy and unproductive, too. Source: Six Causes of Burnout at Work | Greater Good
I can’t quite understand why people still use Facebook’s services, other than vendor lock-in?
[…]
Facebook’s behavior isn’t just anti-competitive; it’s anti-consumer. We are being locked into platforms by virtue of their undeniable usefulness, and then prevented from making legitimate choices over how we use them—not just through the squashing of tools like Unfollow Everything, but through the highly manipulative designs and features platforms adopt in the first place. The loser here is the user, and the cost is counted in billions of wasted hours spent on Facebook. Source: Facebook banned me for life because I created the tool Unfollow Everything | Slate
It’s really problematic that most people get their news via algorithmic news feeds.
So what happened this time around? For a whopping five-hours-plus, people read news, according to data Chartbeat gave us this week. (And they went to Twitter; Chartbeat saw Twitter traffic up 72%. If Bad Art Friend had been published on the same day as the Facebook outage, Twitter would have literally exploded, presumably.) Source: When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up » Nieman Journalism Lab
I’ve largely quit Twitter these days, mainly because the social network I joined in 2007 turned into a rage machine sometime in the last 5-10 years. I suspect it had something to do with their IPO in 2013 and transformation to what I term “software with shareholders”.
This Yale study proves a link between increased outrage and the number of likes and retweets received. But then, we already knew that.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter argue that they merely provide a neutral platform for conversations that would otherwise happen elsewhere. But many have speculated that social media amplifies outrage. Hard evidence for this claim was missing, however, because measuring complex social expressions like moral outrage with precision poses a technical challenge, the researchers said.
To compile that evidence, Brady and Crockett assembled a team which built machine learning software capable of tracking moral outrage in Twitter posts. In observational studies of 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 Twitter users, they used the software to test whether users expressed more outrage over time, and if so, why.
The team found that the incentives of social media platforms like Twitter really do change how people post. Users who received more “likes” and “retweets” when they expressed outrage in a tweet were more likely to express outrage in later posts. To back up these findings, the researchers conducted controlled behavioral experiments to demonstrate that being rewarded for expressing outrage caused users to increase their expression of outrage over time. Source: ‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online | YaleNews
There are two kinds of people who don’t need the job you’re providing for them. The first kind is the independently wealthy. The second kind is the person with an in-demand skillset (or rare knowledge/experience).
The last time I was employed, I kept reminding my boss that I came from consulting and I could always go back to it. And that’s what I did. Employers whose main way of motivating employees is to implicitly threaten them with ‘not having a job’ aren’t worth working for.
Assuming you’re hiring good people, it’s very likely they do have other options. It might be a pain for someone to leave and find another job, but generally it’s something people are able to do.
Using someone’s paycheck as your primary leverage might be effective in the very short-term, but it’s rarely a way to build or retain an engaged, invested staff in the long-term.
The way you motivate someone who doesn’t need the money is the same way you should motivate people who do need the money: by giving them meaningful roles with real responsibility where they can see how their efforts contribute to a larger whole, giving them an appropriate amount of ownership over their work and input into decisions that involve that work, providing useful feedback, recognizing their contributions, helping them feel they’re making progress toward things that matter to them, and — importantly — not doing things that de-motivate people (like yelling or constantly shifting goals or generally being a jerk). Source: how do I manage an employee who doesn’t need the job? | Ask a Manager
If we can’t stop people raking up ridiculous sums of money, we can definitely prevent them passing on that wealth to their kids. Thankfully, more enlightened rich people (in this case actor Daniel Craig) are already putting their own measures in place.
“Isn’t there an old adage that if you die a rich person, you’ve failed?” he said. “I think Andrew Carnegie gave away what in today’s money would be about $11 billion, which shows how rich he was because I’ll bet he kept some of it too.“
But I don’t want to leave great sums to the next generation. I think inheritance is quite distasteful. My philosophy is: get rid of it or give it away before you go." Source: ‘Inheritance is distasteful’: Daniel Craig’s children will not be getting his Bond millions | The Telegraph
My parents, the son of a factory worker and assistant baker and the daughter of domestic servants, were both the first in their families to go to university. As such, they wanted to ensure that their children, my sister and I, knew our way around ‘culture’.
Hence, for me, a childhood punctuated not only piano lessons and visits to National Trust properties but visits to the cheapest seats at the theatre to see ballets and plays. In their mind, at least back then, there was ‘Culture’ (with a capital ‘C’) to which we had to be introduced.
As Kojo Koram from the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, writes, however, culture is something that is continually remade by the people living it. These different conceptions mark the boundaries of the culture wars currently being played out in British politics and society.
It is no coincidence that so many of the primary battlegrounds where today’s culture wars are being staged are the elite institutions that represent a traditional British hierarchy: stately homes, Oxford university common rooms, the Last Night of the Proms. To culture warriors on the right, these institutions best represent Britain’s national culture as a whole. That they are exclusive is part of their appeal: when culture is defined as something that only a few people can access or control, its preservation is best entrusted to high-ranking authorities. Source: Here’s what the right gets wrong about culture: it’s not a monument, but a living thing | The Guardian
When I was a teacher and school senior leader in my twenties I worked all the hours. Not only that, but I was writing my doctoral thesis and we had a young baby. I’ve never worked so hard or be so close to burnout.
Since switching to being based from a home office in 2012 my life has been transformed. With no commute and no planning, preparation, and assessment, I’m paid for the time I actually work. And since 2017 and setting up a co-op, I’m jointly in charge of the means of production as well.
As Cal Newport writes in The New Yorker, others are cottoning-on to these advantages since the pandemic, leading to a wave of resignations.
This is a really powerful essay about the American response — or lack of it to the news that the Taliban have taken Kabul. The author, Antonio García Martínez, contends that Americans are “no longer a serious people” and spend too much time manufacturing reality.
In short, an unserious country mired in the most masturbatory hysterics over bullshit dramas waged war against an insurgency of religious zealots fired by a 7th-century morality, and utterly and totally lost.
And all we can do in the wake of it, with our brains melted like butter in a microwave by four years of Trump and Twitter and everything else, is to once again try and understand in our terms a hyper-violent insurgency of fanatics, guilty of every manner of cultural barbarism, now running a country with the population of Texas. Source: We are no longer a serious people | The Pull Request
This xkcd chart starts in 1980 which is when I was born so, although it has Randall Munroe’s details on it, in some ways it also feels personal to me.
Source: xkcd: Global Temperature Over My Lifetime
I’ve been saying for as long as anyone will listen to me that I can do a maximum of four hours high-quality knowledge work per day. Add on some time for emails and ‘sync’ meetings, and five seems about right.
The difficulty, of course, is the financial side of things. If you’re employed, will your employer pay you the same amount for working fewer hours? (even if productivity increases). And if you’re self-employed, will clients sign-off contracts that stipulate five-hour days?
Like Corcoran, Tower CEO Stephan Aarstol says he was startled by the results when the business adopted a five-hour working day in 2015. Staff worked from 8am to 1pm with no breaks and, because employees became so focused on maximising output in order to have the afternoons to themselves, turnover increased by 50 per cent. Source: The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five | WIRED
Today is the day that the IPCC report is released. Our response to it, in the UK at least, depends a great deal on the attitude that the upper classes have towards it. That shouldn’t be the case.
Today is the day that the IPCC report is released. Our response to it, in the UK at least, depends a great deal on the attitude that the upper classes have towards it. That shouldn’t be the case.
This warning to the UK government with the ‘five main concerns’ of top scientists is quite concerning.
Second, high rates of transmission in schools and in children will lead to significant educational disruption, a problem not addressed by abandoning isolation of exposed children (which is done on the basis of imperfect daily rapid tests). The root cause of educational disruption is transmission, not isolation. Strict mitigations in schools alongside measures to keep community transmission low and eventual vaccination of children will ensure children can remain in schools safely This is all the more important for clinically and socially vulnerable children. Allowing transmission to continue over the summer will create a reservoir of infection, which will probably accelerate spread when schools and universities re-open in autumn.
Third, preliminary modelling data9 suggest the government’s strategy provides fertile ground for the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants. This would place all at risk, including those already vaccinated, within the UK and globally. While vaccines can be updated, this requires time and resources, leaving many exposed in the interim. Spread of potentially more transmissible escape variants would disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged in our country and other countries with poor access to vaccines.
Fourth, this strategy will have a significant impact on health services and exhausted health-care staff who have not yet recovered from previous infection waves. The link between cases and hospital admissions has not been broken, and rising case numbers will inevitably lead to increased hospital admissions, applying further pressure at a time when millions of people are waiting for medical procedures and routine care.
Fifth, as deprived communities are more exposed to and more at risk from COVID-19, these policies will continue to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable and marginalised, deepening inequalities. Source: Mass infection is not an option: we must do more to protect our young | The Lancet
This is Stephen Downes' commentary on an article by Tom Vander Ark. I think crunch time is coming for universities, especially when you think about how people are increasingly applying for jobs with portfolios, microcredentials, and proof of experience, rather than simply a CV with a degree on it.
This made me laugh, especially as in the midst of the pandemic I was using a green screen and changing my Zoom background every day!
<img src=“https://thoughtshrapnel.micro.blog/uploads/2024/4b04687167.jpg" alt=“Stretched letters saying “Zoom is destroying my soul” />
Source: Zoom backgrounds | Mr Bingo: Artist, speaker and twat
I used to be addicted to Twitter before it was cool to be addicted to Twitter. Back when all you got was 140 characters, and I’d find myself composing tweets about my IRL experiences and find that I was basically thinking in tweet-sized chunks.
I’ve since switched most of my attention to the Fediverse (join me?) but there’s something insidious about Twitter that pulls you back in. At least turning off the algorithmic timeline (something you have to keep doing) dials down the rage a little bit…
This is pretty amazing.
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
Source: A Physics Prof Bet Me $10,000 I’m Wrong | Veritasium
Before starting therapy, my wife said that she was concerned that I might “lose my superpowers”. One of the ways of thinking about this is as the Main-Character Energy discussed in this New Yorker article. It’s a vitality you bring to each day because you see yourself in a starring role.
Therapy did strip me of that, but in a good way. Instead of some Hollywood actor, I now see myself in a much more realistic light, rather in the way that social media can distort and mediate the view I have of myself. It means that I see myself a part of a whole, rather than set apart from it.
I think we’ve all felt a close affinity and, dare I say, relationship with people who wouldn’t know who we were if we met them in real life. In fact, I’ve kind of experienced the other side of this due to my TEDx Talk and the TIDE podcast. People at events would come and talk to me as if they knew me.
It’s nice, in a way, although it makes for very one-sided conversations until you get to know people. I think it’s likely to happen again with the Tao of WAO podcast…
The hosts of podcasts in particular are the subject of these intense feelings of connection, as many observers, like Rachel Aroesti in this Guardian piece for instance, have pointed out. I have a few parasocial podcast obsessions myself, particularly the podcasting family the McElroy Brothers, who make the comedy advice show My Brother, My Brother and Me and the “actual play” Dungeons and Dragons podcast The Adventure Zone, among other things. I follow fan subreddits, chuckle at McElroy memes, and buy merch to support the good good boys (as they are called). I have become as much a fan of the McElroys “themselves” as I am a fan of their content. I know their childhood nicknames, their struggles with depression and social anxiety, and I know about the time Justin got fired from Blockbuster for stealing a Fight Club DVD. Source: Why Can’t We Be Friends | Real Life
I’m sitting listening to the new Kings of Convenience album while writing this. As this article points out, listening to albums is an increasingly unlikely thing to in the era of streaming music services.
This isn’t accidental: it’s easy to hop between services when the unit of currency is an ‘album’. But when it’s a regularly-updated playlist that’s only available on a particular platform (e.g. Spotify) that’s a different proposition altogether.
Its most prominent playlists have serious cultural power. RapCaviar shapes the sound of hip-hop, and can turn indie rappers into household names. The genre-agnostic, slightly quirky playlist Lorem curates the vibe for Spotify’s Gen Z listeners. In 2020, listeners ages 16 to 40 used playlists as their primary source for discovering new music on the platform, according to the company. So today, a placement atop one of its playlists can make or break a song.
Spotify isn’t shy about the marketing power of its playlists. In its SEC filing, the company wrote as much, crediting Lorde’s breakout global success to her placement on a single playlist: Sean Parker’s Hipster International. But her example may be an outlier. The challenge for most artists is that playlist listeners frequently don’t know who they’re listening to. A song with high completion rates on a playlist might end up on more playlists, accumulating millions of streams for an artist who remains effectively nameless. In the best-case scenario, these streams, which pay very low royalties compared to radio, could help land the song a coveted advertisement, or better yet, pique the attention of Top 40 radio programmers. Source: How streaming made hit songs more important than the pop stars who sing them | Vox
I read most things online, but I came across this one via my print subscription to Guardian Weekly (which I recommend highly). Leslie Caron, who danced and acted with a host of big names, highlights Cary Grant’s attitude towards money.
I’ve always found Cary Grant fascinating, and in fact my online avatar used to be a photo of him. It seems, as Leslie Caron points out, that one’s mindset can be out of step with reality — which is a lesson to us all.
I don’t think it will be long before we see fields and fields of hemp, just like we see fields of rapeseed at the moment. For example, I often wear hemp t-shirts which need to be washed way less than cotton ones.
With Margent Farm’s hemp fibres, and using 100 per cent bio-based resins, we can produce bioplastics that can replace fibreglass composites, aluminium and other materials in a range of applications," he said."
We can use the wealth of textile science knowledge that humans have gathered over thousands of years to produce a range of textile fibre composites with properties suitable for non-structural products."
Shah added that the plant has the potential to help solve a wide variety of issues."
Hemp is a terrific crop that enables us to tackle a multitude of human-generated environmental problems – air, soil and water for example – whilst being productive in offering us food, medicine and materials," he said. Source: Hemp “more effective than trees” at carbon storage says researcher | Dezeen
Cassie Robinson, whose work I seem to have been two steps removed from over the last decade, talks about the importance of weeknotes and working openly in general.
Her reasons for doing so?
For those of you sweltering away inside a building, it might be better to be blowing air out of the window…
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
For those of you sweltering away inside a building, it might be better to be blowing air out of the window…
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
When I read articles like this that remind me of the film Elysium, I try and tell myself that, in the end, people won’t allow themselves to be treated like this.
But, on the other hand, there are always desperate people. Also, practices like this, if they become embedded in an industry, are hard to shift. This is why trade unions exist and are necessary to counter the power of huge organisations.
‘Future’ is a new publication from the VC firm a16z. As such, most things there, while interesting, need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
This article, for example, feels almost right, but as a gamer the ‘multiplayer’ analogy for work breaks down (for me at least) in several places. That being said, I’ve suggested for a while that our co-op meets around a campfire in Red Dead Redemption II instead of on Zoom…
Remote 2.0, the phase we’re in, more closely approximates in-person work by relying on video conferencing that allows real-time collaboration (albeit still with friction); video calls are much better now, thanks to more consumer-friendly tools like Zoom and Google Meet. Millennials and Gen-Z-ers, who are more comfortable with multimedia (video and audio as well as multi-player gaming), are increasingly joining the workforce. But while this phase has been more functional from a technical standpoint, it has not been pleasant: “not being able to unplug” has become the top complaint among remote workers. (Especially since many teams have tried to replicate a sense of in-person presence by scheduling more video calls, leading to “Zoom fatigue”). As context diminishes, building trust has become harder — particularly for new employees.
Remote 3.0 is the phase ahead of us: hybrid work. The same challenges of Remote 2.0 are magnified here by asymmetry. The pandemic leveled the playing field at first by pushing everyone to remote work; now that it’s feasible to work in-person, though, hybrid work will create a “second-class citizen” problem. Remote employees may find it much harder to participate in core company functions, to be included in casual conversations, and to form relationships with their colleagues. Source: Hybrid Anxiety and Hybrid Optimism: The Near Future of Work | Future
I’m surprised at this list from The Guardian, which includes red meat. As of February, I don’t eat fish (or shellfish) so mussels are off the list for me as well.
What is important, I think, is the bit at the bottom about waste food. I’ve started putting coffee grounds on the garden, and that banana skin curry sounds… interesting!
I’m still blown away by the canvas autofill in Photoshop, never mind AI turning blobs of virtual paint into landscapes! Incredible.
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
If scientists have indeed got this correct, it’s an incredible finding.
He says most mesopelagic species tend to feed near the surface at night, and move to deeper layers in the daytime to avoid birds.
They have large eyes to see in the dim light, and also enhanced pressure-sensitivity."
They are able to detect nets from at least five metres and avoid them," he says."
Because the fish are very skilled at avoiding nets, every previous attempt to quantify them in terms of biomass that fishing nets have delivered are very low estimates."
So instead of different nets what we used were acoustics … sonar and echo sounders." Source: Ninety-five per cent of world’s fish hide in mesopelagic zone | Phys.org
The UK government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy published a report today showing the results of a an online survey into public perceptions of climate change and net zero.
Broadly speaking, ‘net zero’ is supported, but most people think we’ll achieve that through energy efficiency.
Edward Snowden, in his new newsletter, makes the case that self-censorship — the suppression of ideas that never see the light of day — is the most dangerous kind.
Without mentioning it explicitly, I think he’s talking about cancel culture and deplatforming. He has a point, but the modern western world is very different from the Soviet examples which he gives.
(Bonus points for his mention of Michel De Montaigne’s best friend, Étienne de La Boétie, who died far too young.)
Team Belshaw went inter-railing a few summers ago, which included a sleeper train from Switzerland to Slovenia, and it was fantastic.
In a time when we’ll certainly be looking to fly less, this is great news.
The founders say the aim is not to match the famous – and expensive – luxury of the Orient Express but offer an alternative to the basic, state-run SNCF sleepers and short-haul flights.
Key to the service will be “hotel-style” rooms offering privacy and security, and an onboard restaurant and bar. Source: New network of European sleeper trains planned | Rail travel | The Guardian
If I had to characterise the default way of doing things within average companies it would, unfortunately, include giving people more and more things to do until they can’t cope.
This is extremely inefficient, as this post explains a bit more scientifically than I could ever hope to do.
But if science and beautiful math formulas fail to convince, you can reach for an example everyone should be able to understand. The analogy is not perfect, but works pretty well. I am talking of course about traffic jams on the highway. I assume you have been in few. Have you noticed, how when the number of cars on the highway starts to increase, the speed you are driving goes down a bit? And then, it reaches some kind of seemingly illogical point, where suddenly everything comes to a screeching halt, even when there is no apparent reason like an accident or closure?
Remember how the traffic experts keep telling you: “If there is a lot of traffic, slow down and avoid switching lanes to avoid causing a traffic jam?” Well, that’s because with a lot of traffic, the road has a high utilization (ie. less space between cars). By switching lanes you are increasing the variability of arrival (each segment of each lane works actually as a separate queue). By going fast, you are unable to keep driving a same constant speed like everyone else and thus increase the variability of the duration of the task. You are constantly speeding up and slowing down. The task in this case means “moving one meter forward”. Under high utilization, even slight increase in either of the two variabilities or the utilization itself has a huge effect on the queue size. The result: traffic jam. Source: Ignore the King(man) at your own peril | Michal Táborský
This is a useful and to-the-point article about ways in which perfectionists self-sabotage, and the ways in which they can get out of their own way.
As a recovering perfectionist, I recognise these traits, and am still working on both ruminating about “weaknesses, mistakes, and failures” and applying my own high standards to others.
The ways that the author notes that perfectionists can get in their own way are:
I experienced some dysania this morning and made my own Bannock device using some paper yesterday to order my son some shoes online. You?
Source: The name of things , you probably didn’t know | Reddit
This article feels quite foreign to me as a member of a co-operative, but it contains an important insight. I feel that there’s more nuance than the author provides, in that leadership is contextual.
Some people believe that they are a ‘leader’ because their job title says so. But true leadership comes when people choose to follow you, not be coerced into something because you’re higher up the pyramid than they are.
It’s Father’s Day today, in the UK at least. My children, who both delight and infuriate in equal measure, spoiled me with some thoughtful presents.
This article touches on something I’ve observed in others and myself: becoming a father really does change men. As the diagram below shows, that happens in terms of testosterone, but in my experience being a dad changes your worldview.
Drew Austin references Zygmunt Bauman, an author I referenced in my thesis, in relation to personhood and social media. Really interesting.
Austin’s blog, which he seems to have abandoned in favour of a newsletter, discussed his friend recommending the creation of an an ‘alt’ persona “in order to break free of some of the restrictions that an online persona imposes.” I find this interesting in light of my thinking about nuking everything and starting again.
(PS what are we calling Substack newsletter displayed on the internet these days? I think I’ll just call them web pages.)
[…]
As Bauman presciently realized, the constraints of these digital environments and the sheer volume of users endows even the flimsiest online presences with an illusion of unity. Showing up frequently enough in the feed might elevate one’s presence to a work of art, at least from everyone else’s distracted perspective, and this in turn motivates us all to present our own selves more artfully. The speed of the information flow is essential to the entire illusion: A platform like Twitter makes our asynchronous posts feel like real-time interaction by delivering them in such rapid succession, and that illusion begets another more powerful one, that we’re all actually present within the feed.
[…]
Something I frequently joke about—a dark truth that begs for humor—is how social media requires continuous posting just to remind everyone else you exist. I once said that if Twitter was real life our bodies would always be slowly shrinking, and tweeting more would be the only way to make ourselves bigger again. We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood. Reality, as Philip K. Dick said, is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it, and while the digital and physical worlds may be converging as a hybridized domain of lived experience and outward perception, our own sustained presence as individuals is the quality that distinguishes the two. Source: #162: Minimum Viable Self | Kneeling Bus
I’m a fan of metaphor and productive ambiguity, and so I like this improv approach to product development.
Likewise, some products are initiated with a rough idea. This is in the camp of Eric Reis' model, where you’re lean, get feedback, and iterate quickly. The idea is to treat the path to product market fit as a series of experiments with hypotheses. In contrast, there is Keith Rabois' model, where you have a strong vision from day 0 and not much changes from then. The idea is that you have a master plan from the start, and you get heads down on executing it. Check this post by Casey Winters comparing these models with far more nuance. Source: Your product is a joke | The Paperclip
Depending on what happens next year and in 2024, the US might not even be a democracy within this decade…
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
Source: Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim | YouTube
I had reason to reference this image today, which is an update of the classic gapingvoid cartoon. The point I was making is that a lot of organisations think that they revolutionise learning by connecting people to knowledge.
However, as every educator should know, it’s the connections between bits of information, including context and application, which constitutes the learning experience. The thing that gets missed most often, of course, is the “so what?” — i.e. the impact.
This is a really nice way of explaining value within jobs and careers. Not only do you have to be good, but other people need to know about it.
Your ability to have a good career is the product of two things: the fundamental value and liquidity of the skills you have. So, when applied to job hunting, this means that there are really only two things that matter.
I really like Google Maps, but I don’t like how much data it hoovers up. I also don’t like how focused it is on urban areas, so this looks good…
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reflects on sanctimonious social media:
I find it obscene.
There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class. Source: IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS | Chimamanda.com
Nothing surprising about attractive person + financial advice getting people interested, but I thought this was interesting from the ‘monetizing stupid’. Do you interact with the world as it is, or as you want it to be?
I focus pretty squarely on the latter, but there’s lots of money to be made from the former…
But I won’t say that, because I think she might actually be some sort of accidental genius. Credit to me for showing self-control.
She’s taken 2 things that people go absolutely bat-shit crazy over (astrology & crypto) and smashed them together in bite-sized clips made so that even an ADHD-riddled-crypto-obsessed chimpanzee can digest them. Source: Monetizing stupid | Contemporary Idiot
I’m really grateful for people like Kerri Lemoie who understand digital credentials both technically and educationally, and have the time (she now works at Badgr) to steer this in the right direction.
This is interesting: the Associated Press are no longer going to name people involved in minor crimes. I have to agree with their rationale.
Broadly speaking, when evaluating such stories, we should consider first whether the story is worthy of our news report, and if distributing it is indeed useful to our members and customers. If the answer is yes, in keeping with AP’s commitment to fairness, we now will no longer name suspects in brief stories about minor crimes in which there is little chance AP will provide coverage beyond the initial arrest. Source: AP Definitive Source | Why we’re no longer naming suspects in minor crime stories
This is the draft a new standard (spec) to hopefully get rid of those annoying cookie banners. We went through all of this with Do Not Track, so let’s see if this approach ends up working… 🤞
This article is based around a story about NASA engineers in the 1980s, but touches on something that I feel that we know instinctively. While every company will say they welcome risk-takers and rulebreakers, the reality is very different.
It’s one of the reasons I work with my co-op colleagues in solidarity. We can do what others cannot.
A lazy way to describe this would be ‘Airbnb for camping’ but actually, it’s green, anti-capitalist and community-oriented. I might list my garden (as there aren’t many in the UK right now).
We’re going to see a lot more of this in the next few years, along with the predictable hand-wringing about what constitutes ‘art’.
Me? I love it and would happily hang it on my wall — or, more appropriately, show it on my Smart TV.
This is interesting: the number of people say they have in different friendship ‘circles’. Extroverts tend to have more than introverts.
Those numbers are aspirational, right? 😅
It takes time and/or training to transition fully to remote working. If it’s not something you’ve chosen (say, because of the pandemic) then that’s doubly-problematic.
I really enjoy working remotely. I miss travelling for events and meetups, which I used to do probably 10-15 times per year, but the actual working from home part is great. As I type this I’m in my running stuff waiting for the Tesco delivery. Work happens around life, rather than the other way round.
This article talks about one study, which I don’t think is illustrative of the wider picture. What I do recognise, however, is the temptation to work more hours when you live in your workplace. You have to be strict.
Ultimately, it comes down to control. If you’re in control of your time, then eventually you spend it productively. For example, I work fewer than 30 hours per week in an average week, mainly because I don’t attend meetings I don’t have to.
The research certainly concluded that the employees were working hard. Total hours worked were 30% higher than before the pandemic, including an 18% increase in working outside normal hours. But this extra effort did not translate into any rise in output. This may explain the earlier survey evidence; both employers and employees felt they were producing as much as before. But the correct way to measure productivity is output per working hour. With all that extra time on the job, this fell by 20%. Source: Remote workers work longer, not more efficiently | The Economist
It takes time and/or training to transition fully to remote working. If it’s not something you’ve chosen (say, because of the pandemic) then that’s doubly-problematic.
I really enjoy working remotely. I miss travelling for events and meetups, which I used to do probably 10-15 times per year, but the actual working from home part is great. As I type this I’m in my running stuff waiting for the Tesco delivery. Work happens around life, rather than the other way round.
This article talks about one study, which I don’t think is illustrative of the wider picture. What I do recognise, however, is the temptation to work more hours when you live in your workplace. You have to be strict.
Ultimately, it comes down to control. If you’re in control of your time, then eventually you spend it productively. For example, I work fewer than 30 hours per week in an average week, mainly because I don’t attend meetings I don’t have to.
The research certainly concluded that the employees were working hard. Total hours worked were 30% higher than before the pandemic, including an 18% increase in working outside normal hours. But this extra effort did not translate into any rise in output. This may explain the earlier survey evidence; both employers and employees felt they were producing as much as before. But the correct way to measure productivity is output per working hour. With all that extra time on the job, this fell by 20%. Source: Remote workers work longer, not more efficiently | The Economist
The advice to date has, quite rightly, to get any COVID vaccine that’s available to you. For me, that’s meant a double dose of AstraZeneca, and I’m happy about that.
But as the pandemic progresses, we need to be aware that some vaccines are more effective than others. This working paper, building on one published in Nature earlier this year, looks at how ‘fractional dosing’ of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines could reach more people more quickly.
Needless to say, we shouldn’t be in the position where people in less developed countries are getting access to vaccines much more slowly than the rest of the world. But, pragmatically speaking, this may help.
[…]
One more point worth mentioning. Dose stretching policies everywhere are especially beneficial for less-developed countries, many of which are at the back of the vaccine queue. If dose-stretching cuts the time to be vaccinated in half, for example, then that may mean cutting the time to be vaccinated from two months to one month in a developed country but cutting it from two years to one year in a country that is currently at the back of the queue. Source: A Half Dose of Moderna is More Effective Than a Full Dose of AstraZeneca | Marginal REVOLUTION
I really enjoyed this article, ostensibly about the amazing vocal technique of one Charles Kellogg who could “put out fire by singing”. Apparently he could also imitate birdsong perfectly. There’s an interesting video at the end of the article about that.
More interesting to me, however, is the anecdote about what Kellogg’s ear was attuned to, even in a busy urban environment.
But, true to his word, Kellogg scrutinized their busy surroundings, and a moment later crossed the street with his companion following along—and there on a window ledge pointed to a tiny cricket. “What astonishing hearing you have,” his friend marveled. But instead of responding, Kellogg reached into his pocket and pulled out a dime, which he dropped on the sidewalk. The moment the coin hit the pavement it made a small pinging noise, and everybody within 50 feet of the sound stopped and started looking for the coin. People listen for what’s most important for them, he later explained: for New Yorkers it’s the sound of money, for Charles Kellogg it was the chirping of a cricket. Source: The Man Who Put Out Fires with Music | Culture Notes of an Honest Broker
On balance, I’m pleased that this ‘experiment’ is being put to rest. Although I’m for simplifying needlessly-complex aspects of the web, my previous work on web literacy would suggest that there’s a certain amount of knowledge and understanding people need to be able to have to read, write, and participate on the web effectively.
Showing only the domain name was considered a good way to remove the extra chaff from a complex URL and only leave the core domain visible in the URL bar.
If users wanted to view the full link, they could click or hover the Chrome address bar to reveal the rest of the page URL.
However, despite its good intentions, the experiment never sat well, with both security experts and end-users alike, who often complained about it when Google silently enabled it on some browsers to gather usage statistics. Source: Google abandons experiment to show simplified domain URLs in Chrome | The Record
My personal email address scores 1, my co-op email address (because it ends in .coop) gets a 2.
Today we’re going to come up with a scoring system to measure how painful your email is to tell someone. It’s a golf scoring system with low scores being easy and each point is one unit of struggle for both you and the recipient. Source: How Hard is your Email to Say?
Ideally, we’d all be using mass transit rather than just switch fossil fuel-based vehicles for their electric equivalents. But, as a student of human nature, I recognise that autonomous electric vehicles might be a pragmatic stop-gap.
This is an interesting article, as it puts a price on how much these vehicles might cost by the hour (~7 Euros) and talks about what people might be doing while waiting for them to recharge (playing video games!)
This is an interesting article that takes the tennis player Naomi Osaka’s withdrawal from the French Open as a symptom of wider trends in the workplace.
A better way of putting it: Ms. Osaka has given a public face to a growing, and long overdue, revolt. Like so many other women, the tennis prodigy has recognized that she has the right to put her health and sanity above the unending demands imposed by those who stand to profit from her labors. In doing so, Ms. Osaka exposes a foundational lie in how high-achieving women are taught to view their careers.
In a society that prizes individual achievement above most other things, ambition is often framed as an unambiguous virtue, akin to hard work or tenacity. But the pursuit of power and influence is, to some extent, a vote of confidence in the profit-driven myth of meritocracy that has betrayed millions of American women through the course of the pandemic and before it, to our disillusionment and despair. Source: Naomi Osaka and the Cost of Ambition | The New York Times
Buried towards the bottom of an update about the Breaking Smart newsletter, Venkatesh Rao includes this diagram and links to a post where he commits to longer-term work.
In an associated Twitter thread, one tweet talks about one way of telling whether a project is a new TLP (‘Top Level Project’) or part of an existing one: does it require a new name or domain name? Interesting.
As I mentioned on my blog recently, I sometimes feel a strong pull to ‘nuke’ everything and start over again. With Twitter, I actually did this back in 2017, deleting 77.5k spanning 10 years. They now auto-delete every three months.
This article is based on a survey that BuzzFeed News carried out which revealed a shift in attitude, especially among younger people, to social media. (I think we need a different name for social media that any member of the public can see and those that are private to your followers by default?)
Seeing versions of ourselves from 5 or 10 years ago can be cringey, which is why a lot of respondents have purged old posts altogether. Ashlee Burke from Boston, who’s in her late 20s, said she made her old Facebook photo albums private because they’re embarrassing, not because they showed any illegal activity or anything — “unless it’s illegal to be the most embarrassing teenager on the face of the Earth.” Source: COVID Made People Delete Facebook And Instagram | BuzzFeed News
I’ve been using thispersondoesnotexist.com for projects recently and, honestly, I wouldn’t be able to tell that most of the faces it generates every time you hit refresh aren’t real people.
For every positive use of this kind of technology, there are of course negatives. Misinformation and disinformation is everywhere. This example shows how even experts in critical fields such as cybersecurity, public safety, and medicine can be fooled, too.
What goes up must come down. In this case with prices of services backed by VC firms, the reverse is true…
For years, these subsidies allowed us to live Balenciaga lifestyles on Banana Republic budgets. Collectively, we took millions of cheap Uber and Lyft rides, shuttling ourselves around like bourgeois royalty while splitting the bill with those companies’ investors. We plunged MoviePass into bankruptcy by taking advantage of its $9.95-a-month, all-you-can-watch movie ticket deal, and took so many subsidized spin classes that ClassPass was forced to cancel its $99-a-month unlimited plan. We filled graveyards with the carcasses of food delivery start-ups — Maple, Sprig, SpoonRocket, Munchery — just by accepting their offers of underpriced gourmet meals.
These companies’ investors didn’t set out to bankroll our decadence. They were just trying to get traction for their start-ups, all of which needed to attract customers quickly to establish a dominant market position, elbow out competitors and justify their soaring valuations. So they flooded these companies with cash, which often got passed on to users in the form of artificially low prices and generous incentives.
Now, users are noticing that for the first time — whether because of disappearing subsidies or merely an end-of-pandemic demand surge — their luxury habits actually carry luxury price tags.
Briar isn’t the kind of app you necessarily use every day and, in fact, it positions itself as a something used by activists. That being said, it’s really useful that there’s now the ability to send images to other users.
I’ve tested the feature (which requires both parties to be on v1.3) and it works well.
I read recently that some tarantulas keep tiny frogs as ‘pets’. Of course, I had to do some more digging and found out that’s not quite true, and if it were, it would be more like the other way around (as some tarantulas are so docile!)
Good stuff from Cory Doctorow on how Big Tobacco invented the playbook and it’s been refined in other industries (especially online) ever since.
The bad-faith “balance” game is used by fraudsters and crooks to sow doubt. It’s how homeopaths, anti-vaxers, eugenicists, raw milk pushers and other members of the Paltrow-Industrial Complex played the BBC and other sober-sided media outlets, demanding that they be given airtime to rebut scientists’ careful, empirical claims with junk they made up on the spot.
This is not a harmless pastime. The pandemic revealed the high price of epistemological chaos, of replacing informed debate with cynical doubt. Argue with an anti-vaxer and you’ll soon realize that you don’t merely disagree on what’s true — you disagree on whether there is such a thing as truth, and, if there is, how it can be known. Source: I quit. | Cory Doctorow | Medium
It’s been a while since I studied Physics, so I confess to not exactly understanding what’s going on here. However, if it speeds up my internet connection at some point in the future, it’s all good.
A useful reminder.
[…]
How did we get to the point where free time is so full of things we have to do that there’s no room for things we get to do? When did a beautiful handmade dress become a reminder of one’s inadequacies? Would the world really fall apart if, when I came home from a long day of work, instead of trying to figure out what I could conquer, I sat down and, I don’t know, tried my hand at watercolors? What if I sucked? What if it didn’t matter? What if that’s not the point? Source: The Modern Trap of Feeling Obligated to Turn Hobbies Into Hustles | repeller
I don’t have much experience of peer review (I’ve only ever submitted one article and peer reviewed two) but it felt a bit archaic at the time. From what I hear from others, they feel the same.
The interesting thing from my perspective is that the whole edifice of the university system is slowly crumbling. Academics know that the system is ridiculous.
I love this idea. I can think of many ways it could go wrong, but that’s not the point. There’s also lots of ways it could be awesome.
My wife, who is one of the most organised people I know, is nevertheless what I would term a ‘fridge anarchist’. I like order, she puts anything anywhere. Lifehacker agrees with my way of doing things.
I love this response to a letter about feeling bored and depressed. The answer is basically “welcome to the world” and that they’re never going to be happier by getting a better job or a bigger apartment.
Great.
“The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability,” the experts wrote in the report. Source: Military drones may have attacked humans for first time without being instructed to, UN report says | The Independent
I probably need to revisit this (and the references) but I really enjoyed reading Silvio Lorusso’s essay on computer agency and behaviour.
This is good news, especially as I’ve noticed recently a lot of developers of browser plugins just creating stuff for Chrome.
This is very cool.
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
Source: Somehow This Robot Sticks to Ceilings by Vibrating a Flexible Disc | IEEE Spectrum
We managed to get away for three nights last weekend, but I’m truly, deeply, looking forward to being able to do some of the amazing family trips we’ve done in previous years. Stupid coronavirus.
“The only time you really write down memories is when something is novel. For a child, at the end of a summer, they have lots of memories to draw on because so many things are new. The summer seems to have taken forever in retrospect,” Eagleman explained. “But once you’re an adult, you kind of know the rules of the world, so when you get to the end of the summertime, you think, Oh my gosh, where did that disappear to? Why? Because you don’t have any “footage” to draw on. You can’t really remember much in terms of distinguishable memories of the summer because everything else was pretty much routine.” Source: The Brain-Changing Magic of New Experiences | GQ
I have to say that I’m a bit sick of the narrative that we need time off / to recharge so we can be better workers. Instead, I’d prefer framing it as Jocelyn K. Glei does as asking yourself the question “who are you without the doing?”
In short, the prefrontal cortex — where goal-oriented and executive-function thinking goes on — can get worn down, potentially resulting in “decision fatigue.” A variety of research finds that even simple remedies like a walk in nature or a nap can replenish the brain and ultimately improve mental performance. Source: How to Take a Break | The New York Times
Someone mentioned this in passing and I looked it up and thought it was neat.
This is the next step after ‘ghost kitchens’ — a multitude of virtual brands that basically offer the same thing but packaged differently. As the article explains, the step after this is inevitable: companies like Uber Eats cut out the middleman and open their own ghost kitchens and virtual brands.
Wow, this excerpt from Pain & Prejudice is pretty hard-hitting, especially around the paternalistic tendency treating women as ‘walking wombs’.
I rarely watch 24-minute online videos all the way through, but this is excellent and well worth everyone’s time. No matter what your preconceptions are about climate change, or your political persuasion.
[embed]www.youtube.com/watch
I usually share climate-related stuff over at extinction.fyi but this is too good (and scary) an article not to cross-post.
I’d love to see a longer article about this because discussing the role screenshots play in our increasingly-digitally-mediated culture is fascinating to me. Especially as they’re so easy to fake.
These transformations lend a spectral quality to screenshots: Corry calls them the “evidentiary technique haunting the online realm.” Her recent paper examines the case of the former New York representative Anthony Weiner, who was humiliated by the leak of a lewd Twitter message in 2011, leading to his resignation from Congress. Two years later, more screenshots of more NSFW online messages leaked to the press, effectively ending his run for New York City mayor; and three years after that, it happened again, becoming an unexpected and wild tabloid story in the run-up to the 2016 election. (Weiner was later convicted of a felony for sending explicit messages to a 15-year-old, and served 18 months in prison.) Reporting on his downfall suggested that a lack of tech savvy played a role: If Weiner had known anything about anything, he would have come up with some better operational security. He was condemned for his predatory behavior, but also mocked for “not knowing how to use the internet,” Corry told me—a shame on top of a shame. How could you be so clueless as to not fear the ever-lurking screenshot? Source: Screenshots, the Gremlins of the Internet - The Atlantic
Years ago, iA had a map of the web which was much smaller and less intricate than this. My son had it up on his bedroom wall. The digital world is a lot more complex and a lot less English-speaking that it once was!
Companies add ‘binding arbitration’ to their terms and conditions because it usually means they have to pay out less money. However, Amazon had to change their terms last month after Amazon Echo users hoisted them by their own petard. Poetic justice.
Meetings are one of the major ways in which power is demonstrated and exercised in hierarchical organisations. Trusting people and leaving them alone to get on with stuff is more productive, but work isn’t always about productivity (sadly).
Meeting nullification: If anyone in an internal meeting announces that the meeting is a pointless waste of time, it’s over. The meeting organizer is obligated to send everyone the memo that they probably should have sent in the first place. Source: Meeting nullification | Seth’s Blog
I’ve worked from home since 2012, and what was once unusual was becoming more normal even before the pandemic. Now that remote working has been proved to work, I can’t see why anyone (other than those who perhaps enjoy office politics and after-work drinks a little more than they should) would want to go back full-time…
But legions of employees aren’t so sure. If anything, the past year has proved that lots of work can be done from anywhere, sans lengthy commutes on crowded trains or highways. Some people have moved. Others have lingering worries about the virus and vaccine-hesitant colleagues.
And for Twidt, there’s also the notion that some bosses, particularly those of a generation less familiar to remote work, are eager to regain tight control of their minions.
“They feel like we’re not working if they can’t see us,” she said. “It’s a boomer power-play.” Source: Return to Office: Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Work From Home - Bloomberg
Bizarrely enough, given where I grew up, my teenage years were spent reading all kinds of stuff that would probably be shelved under the title ‘literary criticism’, ‘hermeneutics’, or ‘apologetics’.
I don’t think that’s going away, but instead what’s changing is that books (and, more importantly the people who make, edit, and write them) are no longer seen as the gatekeepers to culture.
While I appreciate the sentiment behind this article, I feel that the title is a bit off, and the solution a bit odd. Instead, I’d argue by sharing you work early and often, and in a way that people don’t need to have a meeting with you to discuss, you end up iterating towards better solutions.
The other thing is that, so long as you’re rigorous about working hours, workplace chat apps allow you to fix typos after you’ve sent messages. Always useful for people with ‘fat thumbs’ like me.
And there is the rub.
Every project you do at work needs to be effective, but not every project needs to be perfect. An email you send to a close colleague at your level of the organization can be a partial sentence with typos in it and it will still elicit the desired response without damaging the relationship. A note to your boss might need to be written a little more carefully. A presentation to a potential new client had better be polished to a high gloss. Source: You shouldn’t always give 110% | Fast Company
I’ve recently had to re-evaluate my life and realise that, while there are others who see me as a confident, middle-aged man, that narrative doesn’t bear any kind of scrutiny. Instead, it’s liberating to realise that there is a kind of anxiety which is a two-edged sword; it can propel you forwards and hold you back, depending on how you treat it.
The pandemic has helped clarify concepts that previously felt abstract. “Nervousness”, we see now, is not just a childish affectation but a rational reaction to situations that feel dangerous, a feeling experienced by many, and often. Similarly, we are being forced to reconsider the idea of “hope”. Rather than a simple heart-fluttering optimism, hope has been revealed to be both necessary and a bit of a slog. A decision, made daily upon waking, to seek out good news and drag ourselves towards it using our nails, our knees, whatever clawed instrument we have to hand. It prevents us from sinking so deep into the porridge of modern life that we no longer have the energy to look ahead. Source: Feeling nervous isn’t bad – it happens to us all | Life and style | The Guardian
Twitter jumped the shark a while ago for me and I spend most of my time on the Fediverse these days. It’s an angry space. However, the reason I’m sharing this article because of the last sentence (which I’ve made bold). Ouch.
Facebook has had a similar set of reactions since 2016. But Wong’s leak shows that Twitter could be taking a slightly different path when it comes to which moods it wants users to express: while it has laughing and sad expressions in common with Facebook, Twitter may also include a makes-you-think and cheer option. Twitter doesn’t seem to have the “angry” expression that Facebook does, but that may be because anger on Twitter is already handled by the reply and quote tweet functions. Source: Twitter could be working on Facebook-style reactions - The Verge
There’s plenty to be concerned about in the world at the moment, and this just adds to the party. At a time when most of navigate by following a blue dot around a smartphone screen, we’re susceptible to manipulation on a number of fronts.
Zhao used an algorithm called CycleGAN to manipulate satellite photos. The algorithm, developed by researchers at UC Berkeley, has been widely used for all sorts of image trickery. It trains an artificial neural network to recognize the key characteristics of certain images, such as a style of painting or the features on a particular type of map. Another algorithm then helps refine the performance of the first by trying to detect when an image has been manipulated. Source: Deepfake Maps Could Really Mess With Your Sense of the World | WIRED
I feel like accessibility is where design used to be: something that’s ‘sprinkled’ on as an afterthought once an app has been created.
Needlessly written in ‘academese’ but this article nevertheless makes an important point about the kind of societies we need to foster in order to get to ‘net zero’ carbon (and beyond). In other words, not just the kind of focus-group fuelled politics we’ve been used to for the last 25 years, but… something different.
The obvious predicament of the technopopulist paradigm is that for a variety of reasons very little of these offers contain any trace of the genuine cognitive empowerment we need to transform our polities into knowledge democracies? As leading scholar of deliberative democracy James Fishkin argued focus groups merely ask “..what we think when we don’t think..” That is why it is precisely in the field of experiments in deliberative participation through Citizens’ assemblies that we locate the possibilities transformation. When properly configured (as in the case of the recent climate assembly in France) they offer a far more powerful epistemic foundation. Source: Net Zero Democracy - new tactical research
There are some good points made in this article about ‘desktop’ operating systems but it’s a bit Mac-centric for my liking. I’m pretty sure, for example, the author would love ChromeOS or another Linux-based operating system.
One really interesting point is the difference between human memory and computer memory. In my own life and experience, I use the latter to augment the former by not even trying to remember anything that computers can store and retrieve more quickly. Kind of like Cory Doctorow’s Memex Method.
This is a fun, yet slightly disturbing, look at mansion houses for influencers where people create TikTok videos. The author is a university professor, which makes his insights all the more interesting in terms of the contrast with where some of these young people would otherwise be - i.e. university.
I see a lot of music on Spotify and plenty of YouTube video related to studying. I didn’t realise the rabbit hole went much deeper.
My wife and I have recently bought new smartwatches (me: Garmin Venu 2, her: Fitbit Versa 3) and the things they tell us really makes a difference to how we exercise. What’s reported here looks like next level even to the detailed stats we’ve got already.
“We identified proteins that emanate from bone, muscle, and blood vessels that are strongly related to cardiorespiratory fitness and had never been previously associated with exercise training responses,” says Gerszten.
Based in these revelations, the scientists developed what they call a protein score, which could be used to predict how much a person’s VO2max would change as a result of the exercise. Baseline levels of certain proteins were able to predict who would respond to the exercise with more reliability than established patient factors, according to the scientists, and also predicted which subjects would be unable to significantly improve their VO2max even after a sharp uptake in physical activity. Source: Blood protein score might predict which exercise will benefit you most | New Atlas
Useful reminders in this article from Arthur C. Brooks for The Atlantic that neophilia (openness to new experiences) is key to improving our happiness.
The academic paper that this blog post by Katie Carr is based on is also well worth a read - particularly around countering the e-s-c-a-p-e ideology (entitlement, surety, control, autonomy, progress, and exceptionalism).
As the conclusion to this article states, if digital fashion industry doesn’t differentiate itself from IRL fashion now, it’s storing up problems for the future.
Amazing.
Source: This Storm Photo Shot in West Texas Looks Like a Sky Explosion | PetaPixel
I remember reading that Barack Obama only had two colours of suits while President of the USA, because making lots of small decisions inhibited his ability to make larger/more important ones.
As John Naughton points out, if Apple are the only Big Tech company truly interested in preserving our privacy, we should be worried.
As I predicted, 2021 is the year when Open Badges and digital credentials go mainstream. It’s unsurprising that ‘open’ isn’t front-and-centre in this Blackboard press release, but it’s still a win that this kind of thing is becoming normalised.
Hardly surprising, but it’s important people are still pushing on this eight years(!) after the Snowden revelations. It’s incredible to me how The Guardian and other outlets can reveal this kind of thing along with the financial corruption set out in the Panama Papers and so little changes as a result.
An insightful post which considers the ways in which current working generations can’t “quit the rat race” in the way previous generations could (or could aspire to doing). You’re either plugged into the network, or you die.
But focusing on the risks within the game obscures a much bigger problem: The game is no longer optional. Everyone must play. We have little to lose because we already lost everything: Stable jobs, affordable homes, education that lasts a lifetime, and worry-free retirement are no longer an option. Even money itself ain’t what it used to be. It loses value by simply sitting in the bank.
This is partly a result of various policy failures. But ultimately, it is due to our current stage of technological development. Information moves around and knowledge becomes obsolete faster than ever. Geographical constraints no longer protect the average from the best.
We are all in one giant global arena. We can win world-scale prizes. But we have to play. And even when we win, the rewards tend to be fleeting: they can sustain us for a while, but at any moment, the algorithms might change, or another clever fellow can whisk our followers-customers away. We are as anxious in victory as we are in defeat, and our winnings can only be used to continue to play. Source: No Floor, No Ceiling
Having visited Iceland in December 2019, just before the pandemic hit, I’ve seen these geothermal plants scattered around the landscape. In addition, there are places where fruit and vegetables are grown right over geothermal vents. Awesome.
It’s always great to hear Cory read his own work as he’s such an engaging speaker. This is a particularly interesting example, however, as it meshes so well with my experience of writing in the open for the last 15+ years.
I can’t even imagine how difficult this must have been to type on!
To type a Chinese character, one depressed a total of 4 keys—one from each bank—more or less simultaneously, compared by one observer to playing a chord on the piano. Just as the film explained, “if you want to type word number 4862 you would press 4-8-6-2 and the machine would type the right character.”
Each four-digit code corresponded with a character etched on a revolving drum inside the typewriter. Spinning continuously at a speed of 60 revolutions per minute, or once per second, the drum measured 7 inches in diameter, and 11 inches in length. Its surface was etched with 5,400 Chinese characters, letters of the English alphabet, punctuation marks, numerals, and a handful of other symbols. Source: How Lois Lew mastered IBM’s 1940s Chinese typewriter
🧠 Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos
😫 ‘Ugh fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task
👍 The Craft of Teaching Confidence
🏝️ Log on, chill out: holiday resorts lure remote workers to fill gap left by tourists
🎧 Producer 9th Wonder on Producing Beats for Kendrick Lamar
Quotation-as-title by Albert Camus. Image from top-linked article.
Without capitalism, we could all work less. We could rest more. We could let selfcare, play and creation come intuitively. A lot of things don’t need to be scheduled. We could just let time happen without any obligation to make a particular use of it." class=“wp-image-3968”/>
As an historian, I’m surprisingly bad at recalling facts and dates. However, I’d argue that the study of history is actually about the relationship between those facts and dates — which, let’s face it, so long as you’re in the right ballpark, you can always look up.
Understanding the relationship between things, I’d argue, is a demonstration of higher-order competence. This is described well by the SOLO Taxonomy, which I featured in my ebook on digital literacies:
This is important, as it helps to explain two related concepts around which people often get confused: ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘machine learning’. If you look at the diagram above, you can see that the ‘Extended Abstract’ of the SOLO taxonomy also includes the ‘Relational’ part. Similarly, the field of ‘artificial intelligence’ includes ‘machine learning’.
There are some examples of each in this WIRED article, but for the purposes of this post let’s just leave it there. Some of what I want to talk about here involves machine learning and some artificial intelligence. It’s all interesting and affects the future of tech in education and society.
If you’re a gamer, you’ll already be familiar with some of the benefits of AI. No longer are ‘CPU players’ dumb, but actually play a lot like human players. That means with no unfair advantages programmed in by the designers of the game, the AI can work out strategies to defeat opponents. The recent example of OpenAI Five beating the best players at a game called Dota 2, and then internet teams finding vulnerabilities in the system, is a fascinating battle of human versus machine:
There’s benefits here, though, too. Recent AI research shows how, soon, it will be possible to replace any game character with one created from your own videos. In other words, you will be able to be in the game!
Algorithms have already been appointed to the boards of some companies and, if you think about it, there’s plenty of job roles where automated testing is entirely normal. I’m looking forward to a world where AI makes our lives a whole lot easier and friction-free.
Also check out:
It’s really interesting to do philosophical thought experiments with kids. For example, the trolley problem, a staple of undergradate Philosophy courses, is also accessible to children from a fairly young age.
For two countries that are so close together, it’s really interesting that Japan and China are on the opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to saving passengers or pedestrians!
The authors of the paper cited in the article are careful to point out that countries shouldn’t simply create laws based on popular opinion:
Of course, that’s easier said than done, particularly when those companies who are in a position to make significant strides in this regard have near-monopolies in their field and are pulling in eye-watering amounts of money. A recent example of this, where Google convened an AI ethics committee was attacked as a smokescreen:
When we throw facial recognition into the mix, things get particularly scary. It’s all very well for Taylor Swift to use this technology to identify stalkers at her concerts, but given its massive drawbacks, perhaps we should restrict facial recognition somehow?
The difficult thing with all of this is that it’s very difficult for us as individuals to make a difference here. The problem needs to be tackled at a much higher level, as with GDPR. That will take time, and meanwhile the use of AI is exploding. Be careful out there.
Also check out:
Recently, the Slack-based book club I started has been reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. His writing made me consider giving up my smartphone for Lent as a form of ‘digital detox’. However, when I sat with the idea a while, another one replaced it: give up Thought Shrapnel for Lent instead!
Why?
Putting together Thought Shrapnel is something that I certainly enjoy doing, but something that takes me away from other things, once you’ve factored in all of the reading, writing, and curating involved in putting out several weekly posts and a newsletter.
I’ve also got a lot of other things right now, with MoodleNet getting closer to a beta launch, and recently becoming a Scout Leader.
So I’m pressing pause for Lent, and have already notified the awesome people who support Thought Shrapnel via Patreon. It will be back after Easter!
Recently, the Slack-based book club I started has been reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. His writing made me consider giving up my smartphone for Lent as a form of ‘digital detox’. However, when I sat with the idea a while, another one replaced it: give up Thought Shrapnel for Lent instead!
Why?
Putting together Thought Shrapnel is something that I certainly enjoy doing, but something that takes me away from other things, once you’ve factored in all of the reading, writing, and curating involved in putting out several weekly posts and a newsletter.
I’ve also got a lot of other things right now, with MoodleNet getting closer to a beta launch, and recently becoming a Scout Leader.
So I’m pressing pause for Lent, and have already notified the awesome people who support Thought Shrapnel via Patreon. It will be back after Easter!
Human societies and cultures are complex and messy. That means if we want to even begin to start understanding them, we need to simplify. This approach from Harold Jarche, based on David Ronfeldt’s work, is interesting:
Source: Harold Jarche
I’m more of an ambivert (“like ambidextrous but with personality”) but I definitely feel where Jessica Hagy is coming from with this one.
Source: Indexed
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” (Winston Churchill)
I was in Barcelona on Thursday and Friday last week, right before the start of Mobile World Congress. There were pop-up stores and booths everywhere, including a good-looking Samsung one on Plaça de Catalunya.
While the new five-camera Nokia 9 PureView looks pretty awesome, it’s the foldable displays that have been garnering the most attention. Check out the Huawei Mate X which has just launched at $2,600:
Although we’ve each got one in our family, tablet sales are plummeting, as smartphones get bigger. What’s on offer here seems like exactly the kind of thing I’d use — once they’ve ironed out some of the concerns around reliability/robustness, figured out where the fingerprint sensor and cameras should go, and brought down the price. A 5-inch phone which folds out into an 8-inch tablet? Yes please!
Of course, foldable displays won’t be limited to devices we carry in our pockets. We’re going to see them pretty much everywhere — round our wrists, as part of our clothes, and eventually as ‘wallpaper’ in our houses. Eventually there won’t be a surface on the planet that won’t also potentially be a screen.
This lengthy blog post from Stephen Wolfram, founder and CEO of Wolfram Research is not only incredible in its detail, but reveals the author’s sheer tenacity.
What’s even more impressive, though, is that he experiments with new technologies and sees if they provide an upgrade based on his organisational principles. It reminds me a bit of Clay Shirky’s response to the question of a ‘dream setup’ being that “current optimization is long-term anachronism”.
Source: Stephen Wolfram
This lengthy blog post from Stephen Wolfram, founder and CEO of Wolfram Research is not only incredible in its detail, but reveals the author’s sheer tenacity.
What’s even more impressive, though, is that he experiments with new technologies and sees if they provide an upgrade based on his organisational principles. It reminds me a bit of Clay Shirky’s response to the question of a ‘dream setup’ being that “current optimization is long-term anachronism”.
Source: Stephen Wolfram
As I wrote earlier this month, blockchain technology is not about trust, it’s about distrust. So we shouldn’t be surprised in such an environment that bad actors thrive.
Reporting on a blockchain-based currency (‘cryptocurrency’) hack, MIT Technology Review comment:
It’s particularly delicious that it’s the MIT Technology Review commenting on all of this, given that they’ve been the motive force behind Blockcerts, “the open standard for blockchain credentials” (that nobody actually needs).
Source: MIT Technology Review
As I wrote earlier this month, blockchain technology is not about trust, it’s about distrust. So we shouldn’t be surprised in such an environment that bad actors thrive.
Reporting on a blockchain-based currency (‘cryptocurrency’) hack, MIT Technology Review comment:
It’s particularly delicious that it’s the MIT Technology Review commenting on all of this, given that they’ve been the motive force behind Blockcerts, “the open standard for blockchain credentials” (that nobody actually needs).
Source: MIT Technology Review
As someone who’s been involved with Open Badges since 2012, I’m always interested in the ebbs and flows of the language around their promotion and use.
This article in an article on EdScoop cites a Dean at UC Irvine, who talks about ‘Alternative Digital Credentials’:
“Like in the 90s when it was obvious that education was going to begin moving to an online format,” Matkin told EdScoop, “it is now the current progression that institutions will have to begin to issue ADCs.” Out of all of the people I’ve spoken to about Open Badges in the past seven years, universities are the ones who least like the term ‘badges’.
The article links to a report by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) on ADCs which cites seven reasons that they’re an ‘institutional imperative’:
Source: EdScoop
As someone who’s been involved with Open Badges since 2012, I’m always interested in the ebbs and flows of the language around their promotion and use.
This article in an article on EdScoop cites a Dean at UC Irvine, who talks about ‘Alternative Digital Credentials’:
“Like in the 90s when it was obvious that education was going to begin moving to an online format,” Matkin told EdScoop, “it is now the current progression that institutions will have to begin to issue ADCs.” Out of all of the people I’ve spoken to about Open Badges in the past seven years, universities are the ones who least like the term ‘badges’.
The article links to a report by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) on ADCs which cites seven reasons that they’re an ‘institutional imperative’:
Source: EdScoop
“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master. They can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by them.” (Epictetus)
“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master. They can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by them.” (Epictetus)
There were only 40 children as part of this Ofcom research, and (as far as I can tell) none were in the North East of England where I live. Nevertheless, as parent to a 12 year-old boy and eight year-old girl, I found the report interesting.
All kids with access to screen watch YouTube. Why?
Source: Ofcom (via Benedict Evans)
Tomorrow, pupils at some schools in the UK will walk out and join protests around climate change. There are none in my local area of which I’m aware, but it has got me thinking of how I talk to my own children about this.
The above infographic was created by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas and is featured in an article about the most effective steps you can take as an individual to tackle climate change.
While these are all important steps (I honestly didn’t know quite how bad transatlantic flights are!) it’s important to bear in mind that industry and big business should bear the brunt here. What they can do dwarfs what we can do individually.
Still, it all counts. And we should get on it. Time’s running out.
Source: phys.org
The average age of those who play video games? Early thirties, and rising. So, I’m happy to say that purchasing Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best decisions I’ve made so far in 2019.
It’s an incredible, immersive game within which you could easily lose a few hours at a time. And, just like games like Fortnite, it’s being tweaked and updated after release to improve the playing experience. Particularly the online aspect.
What interests me in particular as an educator and a technologist is the way that the designers are thinking carefully about the in-game mechanics based on what players actually do. It’s easy to theorise what people might do, but what they actually do is a constant surprise to anyone who’s ever designed something they’ve asked another person to use.
Engadget mentions one update to Red Dead that particularly jumped out at me:
But my favourite update?
I think we’ve got a lot still to learn in education from games design.
Source: Engadget
Image by BagoGames used under a CC BY license
The average age of those who play video games? Early thirties, and rising. So, I’m happy to say that purchasing Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best decisions I’ve made so far in 2019.
It’s an incredible, immersive game within which you could easily lose a few hours at a time. And, just like games like Fortnite, it’s being tweaked and updated after release to improve the playing experience. Particularly the online aspect.
What interests me in particular as an educator and a technologist is the way that the designers are thinking carefully about the in-game mechanics based on what players actually do. It’s easy to theorise what people might do, but what they actually do is a constant surprise to anyone who’s ever designed something they’ve asked another person to use.
Engadget mentions one update to Red Dead that particularly jumped out at me:
But my favourite update?
I think we’ve got a lot still to learn in education from games design.
Source: Engadget
Image by BagoGames used under a CC BY license
Until recently, Craig Taylor included the following in his Twitter bio:
Reflecting on what he covers in OLDaily, he notes that, while everything definitely falls within something broadly called ‘educational technology’, there’s very few people working at that meta level — unlike, say, ten years ago:
So, to continue the metaphor, a new community springs up around a new bridge or tunnel, but it’s not so different from what went before. It’s more convenient, maybe, and perhaps increases capacity, but it’s not really changing the overall landscape.
Source: OLDaily
While this post has a clickbait-y subtitle (‘Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself’) it nevertheless makes an important point:
The interesting thing is that, if you do something you find interesting, something that gets you out of bed in the morning, the money will come at some point. I’m not naive enough to think that “follow your dreams” is good career advice, but you certainly shouldn’t be doing something you hate. Not long-term, anyway.
On that note, it’s been a delight to see how Bryan Mathers is pulling together his artistic chops (which he’s honed from zero this decade) and his coding skills to create The Remixer Machine. It seemed to come from nowhere but, of course, it’s taken skills and interests that he’s combined to make something worthwhile in the world.
So, what can you do practically if you’re reading this? Optimise for energy and motivation. In practice, that means do something that you love at a time you’ve got most energy. If you’re a morning person, do something that inspires you before work. If you’re super-motivated around lunchtime, do something in your lunch break. Night owl? You know what to do…
Source: Daniel Vassallo
“To be in process of change is not an evil, any more than to be the product of change is a good.” (Marcus Aurelius)
I can remember sneakily accessing the web when I was about fifteen. It was a pretty crazy place, the likes of which you only really see these days in the far-flung corners of the regular internet or on the dark web.
Back then, there were conspiracy theories, there was porn, and there was all kinds of weirdness and wonderfulness that I wouldn’t otherwise have experienced growing up in a northern mining town. Some of it may have been inappropriate, but in the main it opened my eyes to the wider world.
In this Engadget article, Violet Blue points out that the demise of the open web means we’ve also lost meaningful free speech:
Because of Steve Jobs, adult and sex apps are super-banned from Apple’s conservative walled garden. This, combined with Google’s censorious push to purge its Play Store of sex has quietly, insidiously formed a censored duopoly controlled by two companies that make Morality in Media very, very happy. Facebook, even though technically a darknet, rounded it out. A very real problem for society at the moment is that we simultaneously want to encourage free-thinking and diversity while at the same time protecting people from distasteful content. I’m not sure what the answer is, but outsourcing the decision to tech companies probably isn’t the answer.
Violet Blue’s article is a short one, so focuses on the tech companies, but the real issue here is one level down. The problem is neoliberalism. As Byung-Chul Han comments in Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, which I’m reading at the moment:
Source: Engadget (via Noticing)
Serge Ravet is a deep thinker, a great guy, and a tireless advocate of Open Badges. In the first of a series of posts on his Learning Futures blog he explains why, in his opinion, blockchain-based credentials “are the wrong solution to a false problem”.
I wouldn’t phrase things with Serge’s colourful metaphors and language inspired by his native France, but I share many of his sentiments about the utility of blockchain-based technologies. Stephen Downes commented that he didn’t like the tone of the post, with “the metaphors and imagery seem[ing] more appropriate to a junior year fraternity chat room that to a discussion of blockchain and academics”.
It’s not my job as a commentator to be the tone police, but rather to gather up the nuggets and share them with you:
I think you can see where people like Serge and I stand on all this. It’s my considered opinion that blockchain would not have been seen as a ‘sexy’ technology if there wasn’t a huge cryptocurrency bubble attached to it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you need to understand a technology before you add it to the ‘essential’ box for any given project. There are high-stakes use cases for blockchain-based credentials, but they’re few and far between.
Source: Learning Futures
Image adapted from one in the Public Domain
I’m writing this on a Google Pixelbook. Earlier this evening I wiped it, fully intending to install Linux on it, and then… meh. Partly, that’s because the Pixelbook now supports Linux apps in a sandboxed environment (which is great!) but mostly because using ChromeOS on decent hardware is just a lovely user experience.
Writing for TechCrunch, Danny Crichton writes:
I think it’s interesting to compare climate change and Big Tech. We all know that we should probably change our actions, but the symptoms only affect us directly very occasionally. I’m just pleased that I’ve been able to stay off Facebook for the last nine years…
I mean, just look at things like this recent article that talks about building your own computer, sideloading APK files onto an Android device with a modified bootloader, and setting up your own ‘cloud’ service. It’s do-able, and I’ve done it in the past, but it’s not fun. And it’s not a sustainable solution for 99% of the population.
Source: TechCrunch
I’m writing this on a Google Pixelbook. Earlier this evening I wiped it, fully intending to install Linux on it, and then… meh. Partly, that’s because the Pixelbook now supports Linux apps in a sandboxed environment (which is great!) but mostly because using ChromeOS on decent hardware is just a lovely user experience.
Writing for TechCrunch, Danny Crichton writes:
I think it’s interesting to compare climate change and Big Tech. We all know that we should probably change our actions, but the symptoms only affect us directly very occasionally. I’m just pleased that I’ve been able to stay off Facebook for the last nine years…
I mean, just look at things like this recent article that talks about building your own computer, sideloading APK files onto an Android device with a modified bootloader, and setting up your own ‘cloud’ service. It’s do-able, and I’ve done it in the past, but it’s not fun. And it’s not a sustainable solution for 99% of the population.
Source: TechCrunch
Is boredom a good thing? Is there a direct link between having nothing to do and being creative? I’m not sure. Pamela Paul, writing in The New York Times, certainly thinks so:
I don’t think that’s true at all. You need space to be creative, but that space isn’t physical, it’s mental. You can carve it out in any situation, whether that’s while watching a TV programme or staring out of a window.
For me, the elephant in the room here is the art of parenting. Not a week goes by without the media beating up parents for not doing a good enough job. This is particularly true of the bizarre concept of ‘screentime’ (something that Ian O’Byrne and Kristen Turner are investigating as part of a new project).
In the article, Paul admits that previous generations ‘underparented’. However, in her article she creates a false dichotomy between that and ‘relentless’ modern helicopter parents. Where’s the happy medium that most of us inhabit?
Ultimately, Paul and I have very different expectations and experiences of adult life. I don’t expect to be bored whether at work our out of it. There’s so much to do in the world, online and offline, that I don’t particularly get the fetishisation of boredom. To me, as soon as someone uses the word ‘realistic’, they’ve lost the argument:
Source: The New York Times
Ben Williamson writes:
Of all of the things I’ve had to learn for and during my (so-called) career, the hardest has been gaining the social-emotional skills to work remotely. This isn’t an easy thing to unpack, especially when we’re all encouraged to have a ‘mission’ in life and to be emotionally invested in our work.
Williams notes:
Moreover, he casts this in clearly economic terms, noting that ‘humans are in danger of losing their economic value, as biological and computer engineering make many forms of human activity redundant and decouple intelligence from consciousness’. As such, human emotional intelligence is seen as complementary to computerized artificial intelligence, as both possess complementary economic value. Indeed, by pairing human and machine intelligence, economic potential would be maximized.
[…]
The keywords of the knowledge economy have been replaced by the keywords of the robot economy. Even if robotization does not pose an immediate threat to the future jobs and labour market prospects of students today, education systems are being pressured to change in anticipation of this economic transformation. I’m less bothered about Schleicher’s link between social-emotional skills and the robot economy. I reckon that, no matter what time period you live in, there are knowledge and skills you need to be successful when interacting with other human beings.
That being said, there are ways of interacting with machines that are important to learn to get ahead. I stand by what I said in 2013 about the importance of including computational thinking in school curricula. To me, education is about producing healthy, engaged citizens. They need to understand the world around them, be (digitally) confident in it, and have the conceptual tools to be able to problem-solve.
Source: Code Acts in Education
I like to surround myself with doers, people who are happy, like me, to roll their sleeves up and get stuff done. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of people in life who seem to busy themselves with putting up roadblocks and finding ways why their participation isn’t possible.
Source: Indexed
As detailed here, our co-op decided last week to lift our sights, expand our vision, and represent ourselves more holistically.
So when I stumbled upon Paul Jarvis' post on the importance of making art, it really chimed with me:
From my point of view with Thought Shrapnel, I don’t track open rates, etc. because it means I can focus on what I’m interested in, rather than whatever I can get people to click on.
Source: Paul Jarvis
As detailed here, our co-op decided last week to lift our sights, expand our vision, and represent ourselves more holistically.
So when I stumbled upon Paul Jarvis' post on the importance of making art, it really chimed with me:
From my point of view with Thought Shrapnel, I don’t track open rates, etc. because it means I can focus on what I’m interested in, rather than whatever I can get people to click on.
Source: Paul Jarvis
At our co-op meetup last week, once we’d got business out of the way for the day, we decided to play some games. Bryan’s got a projector in his living room which he can hook up to his laptop, and he invited us all to create a Kahoot! quiz. We then played each others' quizzes, which was fun.
Back at home, I’d already introduced my two children to AirConsole, which they use to play games using their tablets as controllers. I searched for games we could play on the big screen without having to download anything and the first one we played was called Multeor. This involves each player controlling a ‘meteor’ which destroys things to collect points.
A list I found on Reddit was also useful, although some of them are games that have to be purchased via the Steam marketplace. We played Spaceteam which, appropriately enough for our meetup describes itself as “a cooperative shouting game for phones and tablets”. It didn’t require the project, and was great fun. I even played it with my wife when I got home!
While I’m on the subject of games, Laura introduced me to Paddle Force, which our former Mozilla colleagues Bobby Richter and Luke Pacholski created. It’s like Pong on steroids, and my children love it! Luke’s also created Pixel Drift, which reminds me a lot of playing Super Off Road at the arcades as a kid!
At our co-op meetup last week, once we’d got business out of the way for the day, we decided to play some games. Bryan’s got a projector in his living room which he can hook up to his laptop, and he invited us all to create a Kahoot! quiz. We then played each others' quizzes, which was fun.
Back at home, I’d already introduced my two children to AirConsole, which they use to play games using their tablets as controllers. I searched for games we could play on the big screen without having to download anything and the first one we played was called Multeor. This involves each player controlling a ‘meteor’ which destroys things to collect points.
A list I found on Reddit was also useful, although some of them are games that have to be purchased via the Steam marketplace. We played Spaceteam which, appropriately enough for our meetup describes itself as “a cooperative shouting game for phones and tablets”. It didn’t require the project, and was great fun. I even played it with my wife when I got home!
While I’m on the subject of games, Laura introduced me to Paddle Force, which our former Mozilla colleagues Bobby Richter and Luke Pacholski created. It’s like Pong on steroids, and my children love it! Luke’s also created Pixel Drift, which reminds me a lot of playing Super Off Road at the arcades as a kid!
I have to say that I was not expecting to enjoy Cal Newport’s book Deep Work when I read it a couple of years ago. As someone who’s always been fascinated by technology, and who has spent most of his career working in and around it, I assume it was going to contain the approach of a Luddite working in his academic ivory tower.
It turns out I was completely wrong in this assumption, and the book was one of the best I read in 2017. Newport is back with a new book that I’ve eagerly pre-ordered called Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology. It comes out next week. Again, the title is something that would usually be off-putting to me, but it’s hard to argue about the points that he makes in his blog posts since Deep Work.
As you would expect with a new book coming out, Newport is doing the rounds of interviews. In one with GQ magazine, he talks about the dangers of ‘digital maximalism’, which he defines in the following way:
[Maximalism] ignores the opportunity cost. And as Thoreau pointed out hundreds of years ago, it’s actually in the opportunity cost that all the interesting math happens. Newport calls for a new philosophy of technology which includes things like ‘digital minimalism’ (the subject of his new book):
There might be other philosophies, just like in health in fitness. More important to me than everyone becoming a digital minimalist, is people in general getting used to this idea that, “I have a philosophy that’s really clear and grounded in my values that tells me how I approach technology.” Moving past this ad-hoc stage of like, “Whatever, I just kind of signed up for maximalist stage,” and into something a little bit more intentional. I’ve never really the type of person to go to a book club, but what with this coming out and Company of One by Paul Jarvis arriving yesterday, perhaps I need to set up a virtual one?
Source: GQ
“If you do the task before you always adhering to strict reason with zeal and energy and yet with humanity, disregarding all lesser ends and keeping the divinity within you pure and upright, as though you were even now faced with its recall — if you hold steadily to this, staying for nothing and shrinking from nothing, only seeking in each passing action a conformity with nature and in each word and utterance a fearless truthfulness, then shall the good life be yours. And from this course no man has the power to hold you back.” (Marcus Aurelius)
Earlier this month, George Dyson, historian of technology and author of books including Darwin Among the Machines, published an article at Edge.org.
In it, he cites Childhood’s End, a story by Arthur C. Clarke in which benevolent overlords arrive on earth. “It does not end well”, he says. There’s lots of scaremongering in the world at the moment and, indeed, some people have said for a few years now that software is eating the world.
Dyson comments:
I think that’s an insightful point: human knowledge is seen to be that indexed by Google, friendships are mediated by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and to some extent what possible/desirable/interesting is dictated to us rather than originating from us.
What deserves our full attention is not the success of a few companies that have harnessed the powers of hybrid analog/digital computing, but what is happening as these powers escape into the wild and consume the rest of the world
Indeed. We need to raise our sights a little here and start asking governments to use their dwindling powers to break up mega corporations before Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook are too powerful to stop. However, given how enmeshed they are in everyday life, I’m not sure at this point it’s reasonable to ask the general population to stop using their products and services.
Source: Edge.org
I was struck by the huge potential impact of this idea from Marcel van Remmerden:
…and:
…and:
These are all examples of things that could (and perhaps should) be simple web apps.In the article, van Remmerden explains how he created a website based on someone else’s Google Sheet (with full attribution) and started generating revenue.
It’s a little-known fact outside the world of developers that Google Sheets can serve as a very simple database for web applications. So if you’ve got an awkward web-based spreadsheet that’s being used by lots of people in your organisation, maybe it’s time to productise it?
Source: Marcel van Remmerden
These type animations by Federico Leggio, a freelance graphic designer based in Sicily, are incredible:
Source: Federico Leggio (via Dense Discovery)
One of the things it’s easy to forget when you’ve been online for the last 20-plus years is that not everyone is in the same boat. Not only are there adults who never experienced the last millennium, but varying internet adoption rates mean that, for some people, centralised services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are synonymous with the web.
Stories are important. That’s why I appreciated this Hacker News thread with the perfect title and sub-title:
Inevitably, given the readership of Hacker News, the top-voted post is technical (and slightly boastful):
We knew what the future was, but it was largely a secret. We learned Unix from library books and honed skills on hacked accounts, without any ethical issue because we honestly felt we were preparing ourselves and others for a future where this kind of thing should be available to everyone.
We just didn’t foresee it being wirelessly available at McDonalds, for free. That part still surprises me. I’ve already detailed my early computing history (up to 2009) for a project that asked for my input. I’ll not rehash it here, but the summary is that I got my first PC when I was 15 for Christmas 1995, and (because my parents wouldn’t let me) secretly started going online soon after.
My memory of this from an information-sharing point of view was that you had to be very careful about what you read. Because the web was smaller, and it was only the people who were really interested in getting their stuff out there who had websites, there was a lot of crazy conspiracy theories. I’m kind of glad that I went on as a reasonably-mature teenager rather than a tween.
Although I’ve very happy to be able to make my living primarily online, I suppose I feel a bit like this commenter:
Today the internet feels like the real world where the popular people in the real world are the most popular people online. Where all the things that I felt like I escaped from on the net before I can no longer avoid.
I’m not saying that’s bad. I think it’s awesome that my non tech friends and family can connect and or share their lives and thoughts easily where as before there was a barrier to entry. I’m only pointing out that, at least for me, it changed. It was a place I liked or felt connected to or something, maybe like I was “in the know” or I can’t put my finger on it. To now where I have no such feelings.
Maybe it’s the same feeling as liking something before it’s popular and it loses that feeling of specialness once everyone else is into it. (which is probably a bad feeling to begin with) Another commenter pointed to a short blog post he wrote on the subject, where he talks about how things were better when everyone was anonymous:
The closest place to how the web was that I currently experience is Mastodon. It’s fully of geeks, marginalised groups, and weird/wacky ideas. You’d love it.
Source: Hacker News
Old web screenshot compilation image via Vice
After never having visited Barcelona before November 2017, in the subsequent 12 months following, I went there five times. One of the things that struck me was the art in the city; some municipal, some architectural, and some more vernacular (i.e. graffiti-based).
When I was in Denver a few months ago, Noah Geisel was kind enough to give me a walking tour of some of the (partly commissioned) street art there. It was incredible.
I’ve never been to Hong Kong, and am unlike to go there any time soon, but this Twitter thread of Hong Kong shutter art makes me want to!
Source: Hong Kong Hermit
This 2008 post by Paul Graham, re-shared on Hacker News last week, struck a chord:
Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I’ve read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they’re getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. I really enjoyed working at the Mozilla Foundation when it was around 25 people. By the time it got to 60? Not so much. It’s potentially different with every organisation, though, and how teams are set up.
Graham goes on to talk about how, in large organisations, people are split into teams and put into a hierarchy. That means that groups of people are represented at a higher level by their boss:
[…]
[W]orking in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels both right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feels like the kind of group you’re meant to work in, but something major is missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you’re meant to like, but is disastrously lacking in others. These words may come back to haunt me, but I have no desire to work in a huge organisation. I’ve seen what it does to people — and Graham seems to agree:
Source: Paul Graham
This week saw the launch of a new book by Shoshana Zuboff entitled The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. It was featured in two of my favourite newspapers, The Observer and the The New York Times, and is the kind of book I would have lapped up this time last year.
In 2019, though, I’m being a bit more pragmatic, taking heed of Stoic advice to focus on the things that you can change. Chiefly, that’s your own perceptions about the world. I can’t change the fact that, despite the Snowden revelations and everything that has come afterwards, most people don’t care one bit that they’re trading privacy for convenience..
That puts those who care about privacy in a bit of a predicament. You can use the most privacy-respecting email service in the world, but as soon as you communicate with someone using Gmail, then Google has got the entire conversation. Chances are, the organisation you work for has ‘gone Google’ too.
Then there’s Facebook shadow profiles. You don’t even have to have an account on that platform for the company behind it to know all about you. Same goes with companies knowing who’s in your friendship group if your friends upload their contacts to WhatsApp. It makes no difference if you use ridiculous third-party gadgets or not.
In short, if you want to live in modern society, your privacy depends on your family and friends. Of course you have the option to choose not to participate in certain platforms (I don’t use Facebook products) but that comes at a significant cost. It’s the digital equivalent of Thoreau taking himself off to Walden pond.
In a post from last month that I stumbled across this weekend, Nate Matias reflects on a talk he attended by Janet Vertesi at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Vertesi, says Matias, tried four different ways of opting out of technology companies gathering data on her:
Talking of family, straying too far from societal norms has, for better or worse, negative consequences. Just as Linux users were targeted for surveillance, so Vertisi and her husband were suspected of fraud for browsing the web using Tor and using cash for transactions:
Finally, Vertesi goes down the route of trying to own all your own data. I’ll just point out that there’s a reason those of us who had huge CD and MP3 collections switched to Spotify. Looking after any collection takes time and effort. It’s also a lot more cost effective for someone like me to ‘rent’ my music instead of own it. The same goes for Netflix.
What I do accept, though, is that Vertesi’s findings show that ‘exit democracy’ isn’t really an option here, so the world of technology isn’t really democratic. My takeaway from all this, and the reason for my pragmatic approach this year, is that it’s up to governments to do something about all this.
Western society teaches us that empowered individuals can change the world. But if you take a closer look, whether it’s surveillance capitalism or climate change, it’s legislation that’s going to make the biggest difference here. Just look at the shift that took place because of GDPR.
So whether or not I read Zuboff’s new book, I’m going to continue my pragmatic approach this year. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to mute the microphone on the smart speakers in our house when they’re not being used, block trackers on my Android smartphone, and continue my monthly donations to work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Rights Group.
Source: J. Nathan Matias
I’ve been to many a TeachMeet, some where alcohol has been involved. But this sounds even more fun:
Source: BuzzFeed (via Ian Usher)
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution asks how well we understand the organisations we work with and for:
When it comes to politics, of course, ‘leverage’ is almost always something problematic. In fact, we usually use the phrase ‘in the pocket of’ instead to show our opprobrium when a politician has close financial ties to, say, a tobacco company or big business.
In other words, understanding how leverage works in everyday life, business, and politics is probably something we should be teaching in schools.
Source: Marginal Revolution
Image by Mike Cohen used under a Creative Commons License
I’ve always laughed when people talk about ‘trust’ and blockchain. Sometimes I honestly question whether blockchain boosters live in the same world as I do; the ‘trust’ they keep on talking about is a feature of life as it currently is, not in a crypto-utopia.
Albert Wenger takes this up in an excellent recent post:
Source: Continuations
I’m very much looking forward to reading James Clear’s new book Atomic Habits. On his (very popular) blog, Clear shares a chapter in which he talks about the importance of using a ‘habit tracker’.
In that chapter, he states:
You can see a screenshot of what I’m tracking at the top of this post. You simply enter what you want to track, how often you want to do it, and tick off when you’ve achieved it. Not only can the app prompt you, should you wish, but you can also check out your ‘streak’.
Clear lists three ways that a habit tracker can help:
If you’re struggling to make a new habit ‘stick’, I agree with Clear that doing something like this for six weeks is a particularly effective way to kickstart your new regime!
Source: James Clear
This humorous xkcd cartoon is a great reminder of that.
Source: xkcd
As an historian with an understanding of our country’s influence of the world over the last few hundred years, I look back at the British Empire with a sense of shame, not of pride.
But, even if you do flag-wave and talk about our nation’s glorious past, an article in yesterday’s New York Times shows how far we’ve falled:
We’re all familiar with noise cancelling headphones. I’ve got some that I use for transatlantic trips, and they’re great for minimising any repeating background noise.
Twenty years ago, when I was studying A-Level Physics, I was also building a new PC. I realised that, if I placed a microphone inside the computer case, and fed that into the audio input on the soundcard, I could use software to invert the sound wave and thus virtually eliminate fan noise. It worked a treat.
It doesn’t surprise me, therefore, to find that BOSE, best known for its headphones, are offering car manufacturers something similar with “road noise control”:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIzkgLdzd9g&w=560&h=315]
With accelerometers, multiple microphones, and algorithms, it’s much more complicated than what I rigged up in my bedroom as a teenager. But the principle remains the same.
Source: The Next Web
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
What use are old tweets? Do you look back through them? If not, then they’re only useful to others, who are able to data mine you using a new toold:
Source: WIRED
A few weeks ago, I bought a Google Assistant-powered smart display and put it in our kitchen in place of the DAB radio. It has the added bonus of cycling through all of my Google Photos, which stretch back as far as when my wife and I were married, 15 years ago.
This part of its functionality makes it, of course, just a cloud-powered digital photo frame. But I think it’s possible to underestimate the power that these things have. About an hour before composing this post, for example, my wife took a photo of a photo(!) that appeared on the display showing me on the beach with our two children when they were very small.
An article by Giuliana Mazzoni in The Conversation points out that our ability to whip out a smartphone at any given moment and take a photo changes our relationship to the past:
[…]
Nowadays we tend to commit very little to memory – we entrust a huge amount to the cloud. Not only is it almost unheard of to recite poems, even the most personal events are generally recorded on our cellphones. Rather than remembering what we ate at someone’s wedding, we scroll back to look at all the images we took of the food. Mazzoni points out that this can be problematic, as memory is important for learning. However, there may be a “silver lining”:
But while photos can in some instances help people to remember, the quality of the memories may be limited. We may remember what something looked like more clearly, but this could be at the expense of other types of information. One study showed that while photos could help people remember what they saw during some event, they reduced their memory of what was said. She goes on to discuss the impact that viewing many photos from your past has on a malleable sense of self:
I suppose it’s a bit different for me, as most of the photos I’m looking at are of me with my children and/or my wife. However, I still have to tell myself a story of who I am as a husband and a father, so in many ways it’s the same.
All in all, I love the fact that we can take photos anywhere and at any time. We may need to evolve social norms around the most appropriate ways of capturing images in crowded situations, but that’s separate to the very great benefit which I believe they bring us.
Source: The Conversation
On the beach at Druridge Bay in Northumberland, near where I live, there are large blocks in various intervals. These hulking pieces of concrete, now half-submerged, were deployed on seafronts up and down England to prevent the enemy successfully landing tanks during the Second World War.
I was fascinated to find out that these aren’t the only concrete blocks that protected Britain. BBC News reports that ‘acoustic mirrors’ were installed for a very specific purpose:
The concave concrete structures were designed to pick up sound waves from enemy aircraft, making it possible to predict their flight trajectory, giving enough time for ground forces to be alerted to defend the towns and cities of Britain. Some of these, which vary in size, still exist, and have been photographed by Joe Pettet-Smith.
The reason most of us haven’t heard of them is that the technology improved so quickly. Pettet-Smith comments:
The science was solid, but aircraft kept getting faster and quieter, which made them obsolete. Fascinating. The historian (and technologist) within me loves this.
Source: BBC News
Before Christmas, I stumbled upon an interesting Twitter thread. It was started by Andrew Chen, General Partner at a16z, who asked:
Source: Andrew Chen (Twitter)
Today is the first day of the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, in Las Vegas. Each year, tech companies showcase their latest offerings and concepts. Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief for The Verge, comments that, increasingly, the tech industry is built on a number of assumptions about consumers and human behaviour:
Lately, the tech industry is starting to make these assumptions faster than anyone can be expected to keep up. And after waves of privacy-related scandals in tech, the misconceptions and confusion about how things works are both greater and more reasonable than ever. I think this is spot-on. At Mozilla, and now at Moodle, I spend a good deal of my time among people who are more technically-minded than me. And, in turn, I’m more technically-minded than the general population. So what’s ‘obvious’ or ‘easy’ to developers feels like magic to the man or woman on the street.
Patel keeps track of the questions his friends and family ask him, and has listed them in the post. The number one thing he says that everyone is talking about is how people assume their phones are listening to them, and then serving up advertising based on that. They don’t get that that Facebook (and other platforms) use multiple data points to make inferences.
I’ll not reproduce his list here, but here are three questions which I, too, get a lot from friends and family:
“How do I keep track of what my kid is watching on YouTube?”
“Why do I need to make another username and password?” As I was discussing with the MoodleNet team just yesterday, there’s a difference between treating users as ‘stupid’ (which they’re not) and ensuring that they don’t have to think too much when they’re using your product.
Source: The Verge (via Orbital Operations)
“You can’t get much done in life if you only work on the days when you feel good.” (Jerry West)
It’s hard not to be inspired by the career of the Icelandic artist Björk. She really does seem to be single-minded and determined to express herself however she chooses.
This interview with her in The Creative Independent is from 2017 but was brought to my attention recently in their (excellent) newsletter. On being asked whether it’s OK to ever abandon a project, Björk replies:
[…]
The minute your expectations harden or crystallize, you jinx it. I’m not saying I can always do this, but if I can stay more in the moment and be grateful for every step of the way, then because I’m not expecting anything, nothing was ever abandoned. Creativity isn’t something that can be forced, she says:
Source: The Creative Independent (via their newsletter)
Image by Maddie
Starlings where I live in Northumberland, England, also swarm like this, but not in so many numbers.
I love the way that we give interesting names to groups of animals English (e.g. a ‘murder’ of crows). There’s a whole list of them on Wikipedia.
Source: The Atlantic
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” (Winston Churchill)
This article is from April 2018, but was brought to my attention via Harold Jarche’s excellent end-of-year roundup.
Source: The Guardian (via Harold Jarche)
As MoodleNet Lead, I’m part of a remote team. If you look at the org chart, I’m nominally the manager of the other three members of my team, but it doesn’t feel like that (at least to me). We’re all working on our areas of expertise and mine happens to be strategy, making sure the team’s OK, and interfacing with the rest of the organisation.
I’m always looking to get better at what I do, so a ‘crash course’ for managing remote teams by Andreas Klinger piqued my interest. There’s a lot of overlap with John O’Duinn’s book on distributed teams, especially in his emphasis of the difference between various types of remote working:
Some things are easier when you work remotely, and some things are harder. One thing that’s definitely more difficult is running effective meetings:
If you are 5 people, remote team:
And this is not only about meetings. Meetings are just a straightforward example here. It’s true for any aspect of communication or teamwork. Remote teams need 5x the process. I’m a big believer in working openly and documenting all the things. It saves hassle, it makes community contributions easier, and it builds trust. When everything’s out in the open, there’s nowhere to hide.
Working remotely is difficult because you have to be emotionally mature to do it effectively. You’re dealing with people who aren’t physically co-present, meaning you have to over-communicate intention, provide empathy at a distance, and not over-react by reading something into a communication that wasn’t intended. This takes time and practice.
Ideally, as remote team lead, you want what Laura Thomson at Mozilla calls Minimum Viable Bureaucracy, meaning that you don’t just get your ducks in a row, you have self-organising ducks. As Klinger points out:
Think of people as “fast decision maker units” and team communication as “slow input/output”. Both are needed to function efficiently, but you want to avoid the slow part when it’s not essential. At the basis of remote work is trust. There’s no way I can see what my colleagues are doing 99% of the time while they’re working on the same project as me. The same goes for me. Some people talk about having to ‘earn’ trust, but once you’ve taken someone through the hiring process, it’s better just to give them your trust until they act in a way which makes you question it.
Source: Klinger.io (via Dense Discovery)
It’s funny: we tell kids not to be mean to one another, and then immediately jump on social media to call people out and divide ourselves into various camps.
This list by Sean Blanda has been shared in several places, and rightly so. I’ve highlighted what I consider to be the top three.
Source: The Discourse (via Read Write Collect)
As I mentioned on New Years' Day, I’ve decided to trade some of my privacy for convenience, and am now using the Google Assistant on a regular basis. Unlike Randall Munroe, the author of xkcd, I have no compunction about outsourcing everything other than the Very Important Things That I’m Thinking About to other devices (and other people).
Source: xkcd
This article by Ruth Whippman appears in the New York Times, so focuses on the US, but the main thrust is applicable on a global scale:
What I think’s missing from this piece, though, is a longer-term trend towards working less. We seem to be endlessly concerned about how the nature of work is changing rather than the huge opportunities for us to do more than waste away in bullshit jobs.
I’ve been advising anyone who’ll listen over the last few years that reducing the number of days you work has a greater impact on your happiness than earning more money. Once you reach a reasonable salary, there’s diminishing returns in any case.
Source: The New York Times (via Dense Discovery)
I’m sure blockchain technologies are going to revolutionise some sectors. But it’s not a consumer-facing solution; its applications are mainly back-office.
Of courses a lot of the hype around blockchain came through the link between it and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
There’s a very real problem here, though. People with decision-making power read predictions by consultants and marketers. Then, without understanding what the tech really is or does, ensure it’s a requirement in rendering processes. This means that vendors either have to start offering that tech, or lie about the fact that they are able to do so.
We fared no better when we reached out directly to several blockchain firms, via email, phone, and in person. Not one was willing to share data on program results, MERL processes, or adaptive management for potential scale-up. Despite all the hype about how blockchain will bring unheralded transparency to processes and operations in low-trust environments, the industry is itself opaque. From this, we determined the lack of evidence supporting value claims of blockchain in the international development space is a critical gap for potential adopters. There’s a simple lesson here: if you don’t understand something, don’t say it’s going to change the world.
Source: MERL Tech (via The Register)
This diagram by Jessica Hagy is a fantastic visual reminder to stay curious:
Source: Indexed
Looking back at 2018, Amber Thomas commented that, for her, a few technologies became normalised over the course of the year:
However, December is always an important month for me. I come off social media, stop blogging, and turn another year older just before Christmas. It’s a good time to reflect and think about what’s gone before, and what comes next.
Sometimes, it’s possible to identify a particular stimulus to a change in thinking. For me, it was while I was watching Have I Got News For You and the panellists were shown a photo of a fashion designer who put a shoe in front of their face to avoid being recognisable. Paul Merton asked, “doesn’t he have a passport?”
Obvious, of course, but I’d recently been travelling and using the biometric features of my passport. I’ve also relented this year and use the fingerprint scanner to unlock my phone. I realised that the genie isn’t going back in the bottle here, and that everyone else was using my data — biometric or otherwise — so I might as well benefit, too.
Long story short, I’ve bought a Google Pixelbook and Lenovo Smart Display over the Christmas period which I’ll be using in 2019 to my life easier. I’m absolutely trading privacy for convenience, but it’s been a somewhat frustrating couple of years trying to use nothing but Open Source tools.
I’ll have more to say about all of this in due course, but it’s worth saying that I’m still committed to living and working openly. And, of course, I’m looking forward to continuing to work on MoodleNet.
Source: Fragments of Amber
Thought Shrapnel will be back next year. Until then, unless you’re a supporter, that’s it for 2018.
Thanks for reading, and have a good break.
Until I received my doctorate and joined the Mozilla Foundation in 2012, I’d spent fully 27 years in formal education. Either as a student, a teacher, or a researcher, I was invested in the Way Things Currently Are®.
Over the past six years, I’ve come to realise that a lot of the scaremongering about education is exactly that — fears about what might happen, based on not a lot of evidence. Look around; there are lot of doom-mongers about.
It was surprising, therefore, to read a remarkably balanced article in EDUCAUSE Review. Laura Czerniewicz, Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT), at the University of Cape Town, looks at the current state of play around the ‘unbundling’ and ‘rebundling’ of Higher Education.
Unbundling doesn’t simply happen. Aspects of the higher education experience disaggregate and fragment, and then they get re-created—rebundled—in different forms. And it’s the re-creating that is especially of interest. Although it’s largely true that the increasing marketisation is a stimulus for the unbundling of Higher Education, I’m of the opinion that what we’re seeing has been accelerated primarily because of the internet. The end of capitalism wouldn’t necessarily remove the drive towards this unbundling and rebundling. In fact, I wonder what it would look like if it were solely non-profits, charities, and co-operatives doing this?
Czerniewicz identifies seven main aspects of Higher Education that are being unbundled:
As Czerniewicz points out, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with unbundling and rebundling. It’s potentially a form of creative destruction, followed by some Hegelian synthesis.
I think the main reason I’m interested in all of this is mainly through the lens of new forms of credentialing. Czerniewicz writes:
So, to conclude, I’m actually all for the unbundling and rebundling of education. As Audrey Watters has commented many times before, it all depends who is doing the rebundling. Is it solely for a profit motive? Is it improving things for the individual? For society? Who gains? Who loses?
Ultimately, this isn’t something that be particularly ‘controlled’, only observed and critiqued. No-one is secretly controlling how this is playing out worldwide. That’s not to say, though, that we shouldn’t call out and resist the worst excesses (I’m looking at you, Facebook). There’s plenty of pedagogical process we can make as this all unfolds.
Source: Educause
Someone pinch me, because I must be dreaming. It’s 2018, right? So why are we still seeing this kind of article about Open Badges and digital credentials?
Nor do they need to be ‘standardised’. Another person’s ‘wild west’ is another person’s landscape of huge opportunity. We not living in a world of 1950s career pathways.
Arizona State University, for example, is rapidly increasing the number of online courses in its continuing and professional education division, which confers both badges and certificates. According to staff, the division offers 200 courses and programs in a slew of categories, including art, history, education, health and law, and plans to provide more than 500 by next year. My eyes are rolling out of my head at this point. Thankfully, I’ve already written about misguided notions around ‘quality’ and ‘rigour’, as well thinking through in a bit more detail what earning a ‘credential’ actually means.
Source: The Hechinger Report
Betteridge’s law of headlines states that “any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” So perhaps I should have rephrased the title of this post.
However, I did find this post by Gina Bianchini interesting about what people are using instead of Facebook:
[…]
Big brands will be the last to leave. Unlike creators and Group admins, big brands will stick with Facebook for as long as possible. Despite CPMs jumping 171% in one year, big brands have institutionalized Facebook ad buying and posting not only with budgets but with dedicated teams. They’re too invested to acknowledge the writing on the wall, despite objectively diminishing returns. This all comes from a renewed interest in ‘quality’ time. I was particularly interested in the way Seth Godin recently talked about how the digital divide is being flipped. Bianchini concludes:
Also, as we should always remember, Facebook the company owns WhatsApp and Instagram, so they’ll be find whatever. They’ve hedged their bets as any monopoly player would do.
Source: LinkedIn
Writing in The Guardian, philosopher Julian Baggini reflects on a recent survey which asked people what they wish Google was able to answer:
What Baggini points out, though, is that what we type into search engines can reflect our deepest desires. That’s why they trawl the search history of suspected murderers, and why the Twitter account Theresa May Googling is so funny.
Source: The Guardian
Hands up who uses Wikipedia? OK, keep your hands up if you edit it too? Ah.
Not only does Wikipedia need our financial donations to keep running, it also needs our time. To encourage people to edit it, the Wikimedia Foundation have created an ‘adventure’ by way of orientation.
It’s split into seven stages:
Source: Wikipedia (via Scott Leslie)
“The secret to your success is found in your daily routine.” (John C. Maxwell)
While I’m not a futurist, I am interested in predictions about the future that I didn’t expect… but, on reflection, are entirely obvious. I’m quite looking forward to (well-regulated, co-operatively owned) autonomous vehicles. I think there’s revolutionise life for the very young and very old in particular.
What I hadn’t thought about, but which a new report certainly has considered, is all of the other uses for self-driving cars:
Source: Fast Company
Image CC BY-SA Florian K
The talented Abby Cabunoc Mayes, who I worked with when I was at the Mozilla Foundation (and who I caught up with briefly at MozFest), was interviewed recently by TechRepublic. I like the way she frames the Open Source movement:
The interviewer goes on to ask Abby what the advantages of working openly are:
Source: TechRepublic
Tom Loosemore, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) and Co-op Digital has founded a new organisation that advises governments large public organisations.
That organisation, Public.digital, has defined ‘internet era ways of working’ which, as you’d expect, are fascinating:
The only things I’d add from work smaller, but similar work I’ve done around this are:
Source: Public.digital
Tom Loosemore, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) and Co-op Digital has founded a new organisation that advises governments large public organisations.
That organisation, Public.digital, has defined ‘internet era ways of working’ which, as you’d expect, are fascinating:
The only things I’d add from work smaller, but similar work I’ve done around this are:
Source: Public.digital
Over the last few years, I’ve been quietly optimistic about Universal Basic Income, or ‘UBI’. It’s an approach that seems to have broad support across the political spectrum, although obviously for different reasons.
Think of it: The government prints more money or perhaps — god forbid — it taxes some corporate profits, then it showers the cash down on the people so they can continue to spend. As a result, more and more capital accumulates at the top. And with that capital comes more power to dictate the terms governing human existence. I have to agree with Rushkoff when he talks about UBI leading to more passivity and consumption rather than action and ownership:
Source: Douglas Rushkoff
Over the last few years, I’ve been quietly optimistic about Universal Basic Income, or ‘UBI’. It’s an approach that seems to have broad support across the political spectrum, although obviously for different reasons.
Think of it: The government prints more money or perhaps — god forbid — it taxes some corporate profits, then it showers the cash down on the people so they can continue to spend. As a result, more and more capital accumulates at the top. And with that capital comes more power to dictate the terms governing human existence. I have to agree with Rushkoff when he talks about UBI leading to more passivity and consumption rather than action and ownership:
Source: Douglas Rushkoff
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“One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.”
(Martin Buber)
When I was an undergraduate at Sheffield University, one of my Philosophy modules (quite appropriately) blew my mind. Entitled Mind, Brain and Personal Identity, it’s still being taught there, almost 20 years later.
One of the reasons for studying Philosophy is that it challenges your assumptions about the world as well as the ‘cultural programming’ of how you happened to be brought up. This particular module challenged my beliefs around a person being a single, contiguous being from birth to death.
That’s why I found this article by Esko Kilpi about workplace culture and identity particularly interesting:
Although he doesn’t mention it, Kilpi is actually invoking the African philosophy of Ubuntu here.
Instead of seeing the individual as “silent and private” and social interaction as “vocal and more public”, individuals are “thoroughly social”:
This is why I believe in open licensing, open source, and working as openly as possible. It maximises social relationships, and helps foster individual development within those groups.
Source: Esko Kilpi
When I was an undergraduate at Sheffield University, one of my Philosophy modules (quite appropriately) blew my mind. Entitled Mind, Brain and Personal Identity, it’s still being taught there, almost 20 years later.
One of the reasons for studying Philosophy is that it challenges your assumptions about the world as well as the ‘cultural programming’ of how you happened to be brought up. This particular module challenged my beliefs around a person being a single, contiguous being from birth to death.
That’s why I found this article by Esko Kilpi about workplace culture and identity particularly interesting:
Although he doesn’t mention it, Kilpi is actually invoking the African philosophy of Ubuntu here.
Instead of seeing the individual as “silent and private” and social interaction as “vocal and more public”, individuals are “thoroughly social”:
This is why I believe in open licensing, open source, and working as openly as possible. It maximises social relationships, and helps foster individual development within those groups.
Source: Esko Kilpi
In Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, he talks about the importance of closing down your working day properly, so you can enjoy leisure time. Ovidiu Cherecheș, a developer, has built an web application called Jobs Done! to help with that:
The need for a shutdown ritual comes from the following (oversimplified) reasoning:
You are guided through a set of (customizable) steps meant to relieve your mind from work-related thoughts. This often involves formalizing thoughts into tasks and creating a plan for tomorrow. Each step can have one more external links attached.
Then you say a “set phrase” out loud. This step is personal so choose a set phrase you resonate with. Verbalizing your set phrase “provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.”
Finally, you’re presented an array of (customizable) pastime activities you could do to disconnect. I think this is one of those things you use to get into the habit, and then you probably don’t need after that. Worth trying!
Source: Web app / Code
In Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, he talks about the importance of closing down your working day properly, so you can enjoy leisure time. Ovidiu Cherecheș, a developer, has built an web application called Jobs Done! to help with that:
The need for a shutdown ritual comes from the following (oversimplified) reasoning:
You are guided through a set of (customizable) steps meant to relieve your mind from work-related thoughts. This often involves formalizing thoughts into tasks and creating a plan for tomorrow. Each step can have one more external links attached.
Then you say a “set phrase” out loud. This step is personal so choose a set phrase you resonate with. Verbalizing your set phrase “provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.”
Finally, you’re presented an array of (customizable) pastime activities you could do to disconnect. I think this is one of those things you use to get into the habit, and then you probably don’t need after that. Worth trying!
Source: Web app / Code
“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” (Susan Ertz)
“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” (Susan Ertz)
Earlier this year, at the Open Education Global conference in Delft, I went to a session where members of staff from CUNY talked about ‘Commons in a Box’. The latest version, now referred to as ‘CBOX OpenLab’ has just been released:
Its name brings together two important ideas: openness and collaboration. Unlike closed online teaching systems, CBOX OpenLab allows members to share their work openly with one another and the world. Like a lab, it provides a space where students, faculty, and staff can work together, experiment, and innovate. It’s effectively a WordPress plugin which transforms a vanilla install of the content management system into something that allows for collaboration in an academic context. I’m looking forward to having a play!
I had to click through several link-strewn pages to get to the meat of it, so let me just share that here, for the sake of clarity.
Sources: Announcement / Showcase / WordPress plugin
Earlier this year, at the Open Education Global conference in Delft, I went to a session where members of staff from CUNY talked about ‘Commons in a Box’. The latest version, now referred to as ‘CBOX OpenLab’ has just been released:
Its name brings together two important ideas: openness and collaboration. Unlike closed online teaching systems, CBOX OpenLab allows members to share their work openly with one another and the world. Like a lab, it provides a space where students, faculty, and staff can work together, experiment, and innovate. It’s effectively a WordPress plugin which transforms a vanilla install of the content management system into something that allows for collaboration in an academic context. I’m looking forward to having a play!
I had to click through several link-strewn pages to get to the meat of it, so let me just share that here, for the sake of clarity.
Sources: Announcement / Showcase / WordPress plugin
“Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.” (Jean de La Bruyère)
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The prolific Alan Levine wrote recently about licenses, and how really they’re not the be-all and end-all of sharing openly:
[…]
Share for gratitude, not for rules and license terms. I absolutely agree. The problem is, though, that people don’t know the basics. For example, sometimes I choose to credit those who share images under a CC0 licenses, sometimes not. Either way, I don’t have to, and not everyone is aware of that.
Which is why I found this infographic (itself CC BY SA 3.0) on Creative Commons licenses particularly useful:
Sources: CogDogBlog / Jöran Muuß-Merholz
I can’t remember now where I came across this link to a 1947 essay entitled ‘The Catastrophe of Success’ written by Tennessee Williams' for The New York Times. It’s excellent, and I’m not sure how to keep this down to my customary maximum limit of three quotations.
Williams talks about being suddenly thrust into the limelight and a life of luxury after, well, the opposite:
Source: Genius.com
This is simultaneously amusing and horrifying:
Source: You Are Jeff Bezos
At an estimated read time of 70 minutes, though, this article is the longest I’ve seen on Medium! It includes a bunch of advice from ‘Coach Tony’, the CEO of Coach.me, about how he uses his iPhone, and perhaps how you should too:
However, if you take the time to follow the steps in this article you will be more productive, more focused, and — I’m not joking at all — live longer.
Practically every iPhone setup decision has tradeoffs. I will give you optimal defaults and then trust you to make an adult decision about whether that default is right for you. As an aside, I appreciate the way he sets up different ways to read the post, from skimming the headlines through to reading the whole thing in-depth.
However, the problem is that for a post that the author describes as a ‘very very complete’ guide to configuring your iPhone to ‘work for you, not against you’, it doesn’t go into enough depth about privacy and security for my liking. I’m kind of tired of people thinking that using a password manager and increasing your lockscreen password length is enough.
For example, Coach Tony talks about basically going all-in on Google Cloud. When people point out the privacy concerns of doing this, he basically uses the tinfoil hat defence in response:
That being said, I appreciate Coach Tony’s focus on what I would call ‘notification literacy’. Perhaps read his article, ignore the bits where he suggests compromising your privacy, and follow his advice on configuring your device for a calmer existence.
Source: Better Humans
The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.
(Michael Altshuler)
As I mentioned on last week’s TIDE podcast, recorded live in the Lake District, this article from Amber Case about designing calm products is really useful:
It’s a clever way to package up design principles, I think. For example, without reading her book, and over and above regular accessibility guidelines, I learned that the following might be good for MoodleNet:
Source: Amber Case
“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.” (Eleanor Roosevelt)
Eylan Ezekiel pointed to this post on the Signal v. Noise blog recently on our Slack channel. The CEO of Basecamp, Jason Fried, points out that most business ‘planning’ is simply guesswork:
The reason I’m particularly receptive to this at the moment is that I need to be thinking what happens after we launch the first version of MoodleNet. I could make confident assertions, but actually I don’t know. It depends on the feedback we get from users!
I’m always a little suspicious of people who come across like they’ve got it all figured out. Life is messy. This post respects that.
Source: Signal v. Noise
Eylan Ezekiel pointed to this post on the Signal v. Noise blog recently on our Slack channel. The CEO of Basecamp, Jason Fried, points out that most business ‘planning’ is simply guesswork:
The reason I’m particularly receptive to this at the moment is that I need to be thinking what happens after we launch the first version of MoodleNet. I could make confident assertions, but actually I don’t know. It depends on the feedback we get from users!
I’m always a little suspicious of people who come across like they’ve got it all figured out. Life is messy. This post respects that.
Source: Signal v. Noise
“Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.” (Bruce Lee)
I came to know of Ton Zylstra through some work I did with Jeroen de Boer and the Bibliotheekservice Fryslân team in the Netherlands last year. While I haven’t met Zylstra in person, I’m a fan of his ideas.
In a recent post he talks about the problems of generic online social networks:
Zylstra writes:
Source: Ton Zylstra
Over a decade ago, a few Scottish educators got together in a pub for a meetup. This spawned something that is still going to this day: the TeachMeet. I’ve been to a fair few in my time and, particularly in the early days, found them the perfect mix of camaraderie and professional learning.
Does the size of the event matter? I think it probably does. While you can absolutely learn a lot at much larger events that carefully curated such as MoodleMoots, there’s nothing like events of fewer than one hundred people getting together. If it’s less than fifty, even better.
I’ve been reminded of this thanks to a post on ‘tiny conferences’ that I found via Hacker News:
But if I compare and evaluate them based on this criteria: “Did I get what I wanted out of this trip?” … “Will my business benefit because I went?” … “Did I have fun and enjoy my time there?” … “Would I go again?”, then I choose Tiny Confs every time. The author of the post gives eight pointers for running a successful ‘Tiny Conf’:
At this time of political upheaval and social media burnout, it might be nice to even call this kind of thing a ‘retreat’? I’d certainly be attracted to go something like that.
Source: Brian Casel
Update: Thanks to Mags Amond who mentioned CongRegation which looks excellent!
I admit it, I’m not amazing at what’s often referred to as ‘small talk’. I’m getting better, though, perhaps because I currently live in a row of terraced houses containing people of all ages. Small snippets of conversation about the weather, general health, and relatives are the lubricant of social situations.
The Finns, however, forgo such small talk. It’s not in their culture.
[…]
“It’s not about the structure or features of the language, but rather the ways in which people use the language to do things,” she explained via email. “For instance, the ‘how are you?’ question that is most often placed in the very beginning of an encounter. In English-speaking countries, it is mostly used just as a greeting and no serious answer is expected to it. On the contrary, the Finnish counterpart (Mitä kuuluu?) can expect a ‘real’ answer after it: quite often the person responding to the question starts to tell how his or her life really is at the moment, what’s new, how they have been doing.” This article explores whether the Finns need to adapt to the rest of the world, or vice-versa. Interesting stuff!
Source: BBC Travel
I find this absolutely fascinating. It turns out that some societies actively ‘punish’ those who engage in collaborative and co-operative ventures:
The tragedy of the commons is already well-documented, showing that commonly-owned resources end up suffering if people can free-ride without consequences. The above chart, however, shows that in some cultures, there being a consequence for that free-riding leads to contribution (e.g. Boston, Copenhagen). In others, it makes no difference (e.g. Riyadh, Athens).
Quite the opposite: People felt justified to take stuff from the commons. We even had a saying: “If you don’t steal [from the common property] you are stealing from your family.”
At the same time, stealing from the state was, legally, a crime apart and it was ranked in severity somewhere in the vicinity of murder. You could get ten years in jail if they’ve caught you.
Unsurprisingly, in such an environment, reporting to authorities (i.e. “pro-social punishment”) was regarded as highly unjust — remember the coffee cup example! — and anti-social and there was a strict taboo against it. Ratting often resulted in social ostracism (i.e. “anti-social punishment”). We can still witness that state of affairs in the highly offensive words used to refer to the informers: “udavač”, “donášač”, “práskač”, “špicel”, “fízel” (roughly: “nark”, “rat”, “snoop”, “stool pigeon”). A perfect example of how the state can cause the co-operation to thrive or dwindle based on governmental policy.
Source: LessWrong
I was looking forward to digging into a new book from the US National Academies Press, which is freely downloadable in return for a (fake?) email address:
In 2000, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition was published and its influence has been wide and deep. The report summarized insights on the nature of learning in school-aged children; described principles for the design of effective learning environments; and provided examples of how that could be implemented in the classroom.
Since then, researchers have continued to investigate the nature of learning and have generated new findings related to the neurological processes involved in learning, individual and cultural variability related to learning, and educational technologies. In addition to expanding scientific understanding of the mechanisms of learning and how the brain adapts throughout the lifespan, there have been important discoveries about influences on learning, particularly sociocultural factors and the structure of learning environments.
How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures provides a much-needed update incorporating insights gained from this research over the past decade. The book expands on the foundation laid out in the 2000 report and takes an in-depth look at the constellation of influences that affect individual learning. How People Learn II will become an indispensable resource to understand learning throughout the lifespan for educators of students and adults.
Thankfully, Stephen Downes has created a slide-based overview of the key points for easier consumption!
It would have been great if he’d used different images rather than the same one on every slide, but it’s still helpful. Source: National Academies / OLDaily
During our inter-railing adventure this summer, we visited Zurich in Switzerland. In one of the parks there, we came across a dockless scooter, which we promptly unlocked and had a great time zooming around.
As you’d expect, the greatest density of dockless bikes and scooters — devices that don’t have to be picked up or returned in any specific place — is in San Francisco. It seems that, in their attempts to flood the city and gain some kind of competitive advantage, VC-backed dockless bike and scooter startups are having an unintended effect. They’re helping homeless people move around the city more easily:
“Every homeless person has like three scooters now,” [Michael Ghadieh, who owns electric bicycle shop, SF Wheels] said. “They take the brains out, the logos off and they literally hotwire it.”
I’ve seen scooters stashed at tent cities around San Francisco. Photos of people extracting the batteries have been posted on Twitter and Reddit. Rumor has it the batteries have a resale price of about $50 on the street, but there doesn’t appear to be a huge market for them on eBay or Craigslist, according to my quick survey. Source: CNET (via BoingBoing)
“The easiest route to take is to glide in the direction of wherever fate pushes. But living at the mercy of circumstance makes you a passive participant in your own story. Without a fight against fate (aka the status quo), you’ll never venture beyond the expected.”
(Scott Belsky)
Prof. Sonia Livingstone has written a link-filled post relating to a panel she’s on at the Digital Families 2018 conference. In it, she talks about six myths around children in the digital age:
Source: Parenting for a Digital Future
Prof. Sonia Livingstone has written a link-filled post relating to a panel she’s on at the Digital Families 2018 conference. In it, she talks about six myths around children in the digital age:
Source: Parenting for a Digital Future
Last week, Motherboard reported that an unannounced update by Apple meant that third-party repairs of products such as the MacBook Pro would be impossible:
To me, it further reinforced why I love and support in very practical ways, Open Source Software (OSS). I use OSS, and I’m working on it in my day-to-day professional life. Sometimes, however, we don’t do a good enough job of explaining why it’s important. For me, the Apple story is a terrifying example of other people deciding when you should upgrade and/or stop using something.
Another example from this week: Google have announced that they’re shutting down their social network, Google+. It’s been a long-time coming, but it was only last month that, due to the demise of Path, my family was experimenting with Google+ as somewhere to which we could have jumped ship.
Both Apple’s products and Google+ are proprietary. You can’t see the source code. You can’t inspect it for bugs or security leaks. And the the latter is actually why Google decided to close down their service. That, and the fact it only had 500,000 users, most of whom were spending less than five seconds per visit.
So, what can we do in the face of huge companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (GAFA)? After all, they’ve got, for all intents and purposes, almost unlimited money and power. Well, we can and should vote for politicians to apply regulatory pressure on them. But, more practically, we can ignore and withdraw from these companies. They’re not trillion-dollar companies just because they’re offering polished products. They’re rich because they’re finding ever more elaborate ways to apply sneaky ways to achieve vendor lock-in.
This affects the technology purchases that we make, but it also has an effect on the social networks we use. As is becoming clear, the value that huge multi-national companies such as Google and Facebook gain from offering services for ‘free’ vastly outstrips the amount of money they spend on providing them. With Google+ shutting down, and Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, the number of options for social networking seems to be getting ever-smaller. Sadly, our current antitrust and monopoly regulations haven’t been updated to deal with this.
So what can we do? I’ve been using Mastodon in earnest since May 2017. It’s a decentralised social network, meaning that anyone can set up their own ‘instance’ and communicate with everyone else running the same OSS. Most of the time, people join established instances, whether because the instance is popular, or it fits with their particular interests. Recently, however, I’ve noticed people setting up an instance just for themselves.
At first, I thought this was a quirky and slightly eccentric thing to do. It seemed like the kind of thing that tech-literate people do just because they can. But then, I read a post by Laura Kalbag where she explained her reasoning:
You can also make custom emoji for your own Mastodon instance that every other instance can see and/or share. Ton Zylstra is another person who has blogged about running his own instance. It would seem that this is a simple thing to do using a service such as masto.host.
Of course, many people reading this will think so what? And, perhaps, that seems like a whole lot of hassle. Maybe so. I hope it’s not hyperbolic to say so, but for me, I see all of this as being equivalent to climate change. It’s something that we all know we need to do something about but, for most of us, it’s just too much hassle to think about what could happen in future.
I, for one, hope that we’re not looking back from (a very hot) year 2050 regretting the choices we made in 2018.
“Graceful conduct is the chief ornament of life; it gets you out of any tight situation.”
(Baltasar Gracián)
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“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”
(Paolo Coelho)
There seems to a lot of pushback at the moment against the kind of lifestyle that’s a direct result of the Silicon Valley mindset. People are rejecting everything from the Instagram ‘influencer’ approach to life to the ‘techbro’-style crazy working hours.
This week saw Basecamp, a company that prides itself on the work/life balance of its employees and on rejecting venture capital, publish another book. You can guess at what it focuses on from its title, It doesn’t have to be crazy at work. I’ve enjoyed and have recommended their previous books (as ‘37 Signals’), and am looking forward to reading this latest one.
Alongside that book, I’ve seen three articles that, to me at least, are all related to the same underlying issues. The first comes from Simone Stolzoff who writes in Quartz at Work that we’re no longer quite sure what we’re working for:
Sources: Basecamp / Quartz at Work / The New York Times / The Guardian
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post explaining how appeals to ‘meritocracy’ are problematic, particularly in education. The world is not a neutral place and meritocracy can actually entrench privilege.
I’m glad to see, therefore, that Mozilla have decided to stop using the term:
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post explaining how appeals to ‘meritocracy’ are problematic, particularly in education. The world is not a neutral place and meritocracy can actually entrench privilege.
I’m glad to see, therefore, that Mozilla have decided to stop using the term:
I’m composing this post on ChromeOS, which is a little bit hypocritical, but yesterday I was shocked to discover how much data I was ‘accidentally’ sharing with Google. Check it out for yourself by going to your Google account’s activity controls page.
This article talks about how Google have become less trustworthy of late:
I love academia. Apparently researchers in psychology are using ‘hyperactive agency detection’ and a ‘Bullshit Receptivity Scale’ in their work to describe traits found in human subjects. It’s particularly useful when researching the tendency of people to believe in conspiracy theories, apparently:
[…]
To measure participants’ tendency to attribute intent to events, we asked them to interpret the actions portrayed by animated shapes (Abell, Happé, & Frith, 2000), a series of videos lasting from thirty seconds to one minute depicting two triangles whose actions range from random (e.g., bumping around the screen following a geometric pattern) to resembling complex social interactions (e.g., one shape “bullying” the other). These animations were originally designed to detect deficits in the development of theory of mind. I’ve no idea about the validity of the conclusions in this particular study (especially as it doesn’t seem to be peer-reviewed yet) but I always like discovering terms that provide a convenient shorthand.
For example, I can imagine exclaiming that someone is “off the Bullshit Receptivity Scale!” or has “hyperactive agency detection”. Nice.
Source: SSRN (via Pharyngula)
“To listen well, is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversation.” (Chinese Proverb)
Eylan Ezekiel shared this article in the Slack channel we hang out in most days. It’s a useful set of questions for when you’re in a coaching situation — which could be in sports, at work, when teaching, or even parenting:
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Sitting, apparently, is the new smoking. That’s one of the reasons I bought a standing desk, meaning that most days, I’m working while upright. Knowledge work, however, whether sitting or standing is tiring.
Why is that? This article reports on a study that may have an answer.
Interesting article about how to change your long-term behaviours. I’ve managed to stop biting my nails (I know, I know), become pescetarian, and largely give up drinking coffee through similar advice:
My thanks to Amy Burvall for bringing to my attention this article about how we’re teaching History incorrectly. Its focus is on how ‘fact-checking’ is so different with the internet than it was beforehand. There’s a lot of similarities between what the interviewee, Sam Wineburg, has to say and what Mike Caulfield has been working on with Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers:
I’m not one to watch a 30-minute video, as usually it’s faster and more interesting to read the transcription. I’ll always make an exception, however, for Cory Doctorow who not only speaks almost as fast as I can read, but is so enthusiastic and passionate about his work that it’s a lot more satisfying to see him speak.
You have to watch his keynote at the Decentralized Web Summit last month. It’s not only a history lesson and a warning, but he puts in ways that really make you see what the problem is. Inspiring stuff.
Source: Boing Boing
Note: I’m testing shorter, more to-the-point updates, alongside the regular ones. Let me know what you think in the comments!
[…]
This isn’t the first time a gig-oriented online service has petitioned the SEC. Uber met with the Commission more than once to ask about the possibility. Airbnb is pushing for a direct policy change, however, where Uber was more interested in how it could offer shares under the existing framework. Source: Engadget
Hello Thought Shrapnel readers! Some of you have asked over the last few months why the ability to comment on posts is switched off here.
Well, that’s mainly because I noticed a general downwards trend in the quality of online comments. For example, people would share their opinions on my blog posts without reading more than the title, or just link to their own stuff. And then there’s the perennial problem of spam.
This week I’m going to run an experiment and leave comments open. Everything I post from today to the end of the week you’ll be able to comment on directly.
I like the approach that Dan Meyer takes on his blog with adding ‘featured comments’ to his posts after the fact. I may try that.
Let’s see how it goes…
Image by clement127 used under a Creative Commons license
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Since starting work with Moodle, I’ve been advocating for upgrading its Open Badges implementation to v2.0. It’s on the horizon, thankfully. The reason I’m particularly interested in this is endorsement, the value of which is explained in a post by Don Presant:
Source: Open Badge Factory
A few days ago, Twitter posted a photo of an early sketch that founder Jack Dorsey made for the initial user interface. It included settings to inform a user’s followers that they might not respond immediately because they were in the part or busy reading.
A day later, an article in The New Yorker about social media used a stark caption for its header image:
The article quotes James Bridle’s book New Dark Age, a book which is sitting waiting for me on my shelf when I get back home from this work trip.
Source: The New Yorker
I’ve featured the work of Albert Wenger a few times before on Thought Shrapnel. He maintains a blog called Continuations and is writing a book called World After Capital.
In this post, he expands on a point he makes in his book around the ‘Digital Feedback Loop’ which, Wenger says, has three components:
In fact, this reminds me of some work Martin Weller at the Open University has done around a pedagogy of abundance. After reviewing the effect of the ‘abundance’ model in the digital marketplace, looks at what that means for education. He concludes:
My children, for example, with a few minor updates, are experiencing the very same state education I received a quarter of a century ago. The world has moved on, yet the mindset of scarcity remains. They’re not going to have a job for life. They don’t need to selfishly hold onto their ‘intellectual property’. And they certainly don’t need to learn how to sit still within a behaviourist classroom.
Source: Continuations
“Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone. Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in your own.” Adam Lindsay Gordon
I wouldn’t even have bothered clicking on this article if it weren’t for one simple fact: my son can’t get enough of this guy’s YouTube channel.
[…]
In college, Jess [his wife] started streaming to better understand why Tyler would go hours without replying to her texts. A day in, she realized how consuming it was. “It’s physically exhausting but also mentally because you’re sitting there constantly interacting,” Tyler says. “I’m engaging a lot more senses than if I were just gaming by myself. We’re not sitting there doing nothing. I don’t think anyone gets that." The reason for sharing this here is because I’m going to use this as an example of deliberate practice.
“When I die, I get so upset,” he says. “You can play every single day, you’re not practicing. You die, and oh well, you go onto the next game. When you’re practicing, you’re taking every single match seriously, so you don’t have an excuse when you die. You’re like, ‘I should have rotated here, I should have pushed there, I should have backed off.’ A lot of people don’t do that." The article is worth a read, for several reasons. It shows why e-sports are going to be even bigger than regular sports for my children’s generation. It demonstrates how to get to the top in anything you have to put in the time and effort. And, perhaps, above all, it shows that, just as I’ve found, growing up spending time in front of screens can be pretty lucrative.
Source: ESPN
“We see ourselves as non-conformist, but I think all of this [online shaming] is creating a more conformist, conservative age… We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.” (Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed)
You may recognise Cloudflare’s name from their provision of of ‘snapshots’ of websites that are currently experiencing problems. They do this through what’s called ‘distributed DNS’ which some of the issues around centralisation of the web. I use their 1.1.1.1 DNS service via Blokada on my smartphone to improve speed and privacy.
The ultimate goal, as we seek to move away from proprietary silos run by big tech companies (what I tend to call ‘SaaS with shareholders’), is to re-decentralise the web. I’ve already experimented with this, after speaking at a conference in Barcelona on the subject last October, and experimenting with my own ‘uncensorable’ blog using ZeroNet.
Up to now, however, it hasn’t been easy to jump from the regular ‘ol web (the one you’re used to browsing using https) and the distributed web (DWeb). You need a gateway to use a regular web browser with the DWeb. I set up one of these last year and quickly had to take it down as it was expensive to run!
I’m delighted, therefore, to see that Cloudflare have launched an IPFS gateway. IPFS stands for ‘InterPlanetary File System’ and is a “peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open”. It does lots of cool stuff around redundancy and resilience that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, it’s the future.
Source: Cloudflare blog
(Related: The Guardian on the DWeb, and Fred Wilson’s take on Cloudflare’s IPFS gateway)
Noah Geisel, who I know from the world of Open Badges, has written a great post on how to be an educational consultant. I’ve got some advice of my own to add to his, but I’ll let him set the scene:
Like Noah, the first thing I’d do is try and get underneath the desire to do something different. Why is that? I think he does this brilliantly by asking whether potential consultants are running towards, or running away, from something:
If no-one’s asking if you can help them out with something that you already specialise in, then it’s going to be long, hard struggle to be seen as an expert, get gigs, and pay your mortgage. However, if you do decide to make the leap, I like the way Noah demarcates the types of consultancy you can do:
If you’ve been used to a job where you do lots of different things, such as teaching, the temptation is going to be to offer lots of different services. The trouble with that, of course, is that people find it difficult to know what you’re selling.
As Noah says, it’s great to earn a bit of money on the side, but that’s very different to deciding that your going to rely on products you can sell and services you can provide for your income. I did it successfully for three years, before deciding to take my current four day per week position with Moodle, and work with the co-op on the side.
Finally, one thing that might help is to see your life as have ‘seasons’. I think too many people see their professional life as some kind of ladder which they need to climb. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s always nice to be well-paid (and I’ve never earned more than when I was consulting full-time) but there’s other things that are valuable in life: colleagues, security, and benefits such as a pension and healthcare, to name but a few.
Source: Verses
(Related: a post I wrote of my experiences after two years of full-time consultancy)
Content marketing and blogging may be diametrically opposed to each other, but one isn’t bad and the other good. There’s just what’s right for how you want to operate and what you need your content to do for you or your audience. It’s just something to consider – does the intent of how you want to exist as a content creator online actually line up with how you’re operating? If it doesn’t, perhaps it’s time to change. (Paul Jarvis)
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Although I listen to a lot of podcasts (here’s my OPML file) I don’t listen to many audiobooks. That’s partly because I never feel up-to-date with my podcast listening, but also because I often read before going to sleep. It’s much more difficult to find your place again if you drift off while listening than while reading!
This article in TIME magazine (is it still a ‘magazine’?) looks at the research into whether listening to an audiobook is like reading using your eyes. Well, first off, it would seem that there’s no difference in recall of facts given a non-fiction text:
There’s a really interesting point made in the article about how dead-tree books allow for a slight ‘rest’ while you’re reading:
Source: TIME / Lifehacker
The EU is certainly coming out swinging against Big Tech this year. Or at least it thinks it is. Yesterday, the European Parliament voted in favour of three proposals, outlined by the EFF’s indefatigable Cory Doctorow as:
Article 11: Linking to the news using more than one word from the article is prohibited unless you’re using a service that bought a license from the news site you want to link to. News sites can charge anything they want for the right to quote them or refuse to sell altogether, effectively giving them the right to choose who can criticise them. Member states are permitted, but not required, to create exceptions and limitations to reduce the harm done by this new right.
Article 12a: No posting your own photos or videos of sports matches. Only the “organisers” of sports matches will have the right to publicly post any kind of record of the match. No posting your selfies, or short videos of exciting plays. You are the audience, your job is to sit where you’re told, passively watch the game and go home. Music Week pointed out that Article 13 is particularly problematic for artists:
Source: Music Week / EFF / The Verge
This map of what happens when you interact with a digital assistant such as the Amazon Echo is incredible. The image is taken from a length piece of work which is trying to bring attention towards the hidden costs of using such devices.
Sources: Anatomy of AI and Bloomberg
Look at the following list and answer honestly the extent to which your current role, either as an employee or freelancer, matches up:
It’s easier to see how remote positions fulfil points #4 and #5 than being employed in a particular place to work certain hours. On the other hand, the second part of #3 and #6 can be difficult remotely.
My advice? Focus on on #1 and #2 as they’re perhaps the most difficult to engineer. As an employee, look for interesting jobs with companies that have a pro-social mission. And if you’re a freelancer, once you’re financially secure, seek out gigs with similar.
Source: Fast Company
Image by WOCinTech Chat used under a CC BY license
“It appear[s] like a calm existence [but] the turmoil is invisible.” (Maira Kalman)
Some people are easy to follow online. They have one social media account to which they post regularly, and back that up with a single website where they expand on those points.
Stowe Boyd, whose work I’ve followed (or attempted to follow) for a few years now, is not one of these people. In fact, the number of platforms he tried earlier this year prompted me to get in touch with him to ask just how many platforms now had his subscribers' email addresses.
Ironically, it was only last week that I decided to support Stowe’s latest venture via Substack. However, in a post yesterday he explains that he’s going ‘back to square one’:
So if you’re putting things online, you have to make sure it works for you. Even the most fun jobs imaginable can become… something else if you focus too much on what a fickle audience wants.
Source: Work Futures
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This chart, via Psychology Today, is pretty unequivocal. It shows the activities correlated with happiness (green) and unhappiness (red) in American teenagers:
I discussed this with our eleven year-old son, who pretty much just nodded his head. I’m not sure he knew what to say, given that most of the things he enjoys doing in his free time are red on that chart!
Source: Psychology Today
I’ve used quite a bit of Ben Werdmuller’s software over the years. He co-founded Elgg, which I used for some of my postgraduate work, and Known, which a few of us experimented with for blogging a few years ago.
Ben’s always been an entrepreneur and is currently working on blockchain technologies after working for an early stage VC company. He’s a thoughtful human being and writes about technology and the humans who create it, and in this post bemoans the macho work culture endemic in tech:
After all, if you don’t know the point of what you’re working for, then you’ll be lacking motivation no matter how many (or few) hours you work.
Source: Ben Werdmuller
In last week’s newsletter, the first after a month’s hiatus over the summer, I asked the 1,500+ subscribers to Thought Shrapnel’s if they’d send me answers to the following:
Here’s an anonymised sample of what they said:
“With your expertise and knowledge, but you’ll never be an artist
And I’m harder on myself than you could ever be regardless
What I’ll never be is flawless, all I’ll ever be is honest
Even when I’m gone they’re gonna say I brought it”
(Eminem)
I’ve been following Dan Meyer’s work on-and-off for over a decade now. He’s a Maths teacher by trade, but now working as Chief Academic Officer at Desmos after gaining his PhD from Stanford. He’s a smart guy, and a great blogger.
Dan’s particularly interested in how kids learn Maths (or ‘Math’ because he’s American) and is always particularly concerned to disprove/squash approaches that don’t work:
Children are very good at giving the impression to adults that they understand and can do what they’re being told to do. Poke a little, and you come to realise that they don’t really understand what’s going on. That’s particularly true in History, where it’s easy to regurgitate facts and dates, without any empathy or historical understanding.
Another thing that Dan points out which I think we should all take to heart is that we should learn a bit of humility. He criticises both Barbara Oakley (op-ed in The New York Times) and Paul Morgan (author of an article with which he disagrees for not having what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call ‘skin in the game':
Source: dy/dan
A colleague, who also works remotely, shared this article recently. Although I enjoy working remotely, it’s not without its downsides.
The author, Martin De Wulf, is a coder writing for an audience of software engineers. That’s not me, but I do work in the world of tech. The things that De Wulf says makes remote working stressful are:
You may not be able to detect it, but fluorescent lights flicker. They trigger my migraines. In fact, they affect me to such an extent that, when I worked at the university, I was on the ‘disabled’ list and had to have adjustments made. These included making sure I sat near a window to maximise the amount of natural light in my workspace.
In this HBR article, written by a partner at a HR advisory and research firm, the author cites a survey which shows that all employees want access to natural light
Source: Harvard Business Review
“People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.”
(Ellen Ullman)
Austin Kleon makes a simple, but important point, about how to become a writer:
Source: Austin Kleon
* Note: I left my old e-reader on the flight home from our holiday. I took the opportunity to upgrade to the bq Cervantes 4, which I bought from Amazon Spain.
After a wonderful August, travelling with my family and taking time off from Thought Shrapnel, I’m back.
This is the 420th post here. I collect potential posts as drafts, which means I’ve currently got a backlog of 157 potential posts. Obviously, the vast majority of those are never going to see the light of day, so I thought I’d just link to them below.
Here’s a list of 10 articles from each of the first six months of 2018. They’re links that I never got around to writing about, but I think might interest you. Note that I’ve listed them in terms of when I discovered them, which is not necessarily when they were originally published.
Please consider supporting this work via Patreon. It’s the best way of demonstrating your appreciation for Doug’s time and effort, and ensures that Thought Shrapnel keeps going — not just for you, but for everyone. 👍
“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
We tend to use words to denote something right up to the time that term becomes untenable. Someone has to invent a better one. Take mobile phones, for example. They’re literally named after the least-used app on there, so we’re crying out for a different way to refer to them. Perhaps a better name would be ‘trackers’.
These days, most people use mobile devices for social networking. These are available free at the point of access, funded by what we’re currently calling ‘advertising’. However, as this author notes, it’s nothing of the sort:
Unfortunately, the author doesn’t seem to have come to the conclusion yet that it’s the logic of capitalism that go us here. Instead, he just points out that people’s privacy is being abused.
That being said, the three suggestions he makes are use
As an aside, it’s interesting to note that those that previously defended Apple as somehow ‘different’ on privacy, despite being the world’s most profitable company, are starting to backtrack.
Source: Nicholas Rempel
One of the things I like about Hacker News is that, as well as providing useful links to technically-minded stuff, there are also ‘Ask HN’ threads where a user asks a question of the rest of the community.
When I browse HN, I usually pick out a few articles I want to read from the front page, then email the links to myself to read later.
This method works out pretty well for me. I’m wondering if people have other strategies that work better? I don’t like the ‘inbox as to-do list’ method. Other HN users suggested alternatives, with the top-voted comment at the time of writing this being:
They both allow you to save the full text of an article to read later, as well as archiving and organizing articles you’ve already read. They sync to phones, so most of my reading actually happens on public transit. Pocket can also sync to a Kobo ebook reader; not sure about Kindle, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked with them, too. Pocket is great, but I used IFTTT to automatically send RSS feeds there at one point, and now it seems to be in an endless sync loop.
Other HN users said that they pin bookmarks, and so have many, many tabs open at one time. I think that’s a hugely inefficient and resource-intensive approach.
Some kept it super-simple:
I’d rather write about a few links rather than bookmark lots. I’ve all but given up on bookmarking, as it’s almost as quick to search the web for something I’m looking for as it is to search my bookmarks…
Source: Hacker News
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I work, for the most part, in my home office. Physically-speaking it’s a solitary existence as my office is separate to my house. However, I’m constantly talking to people via Telegram, Slack, and Mastodon. It doesn’t feel lonely at all.
So this article about collaboration, which I discovered via Stowe Boyd, is an interesting one:
Work at MIT found that collaboration—where a bunch of people put their heads together to try to come up with innovative solutions—generally “reduced creativity due to the tendency to incrementally modify known successful designs rather than explore radically different and potentially superior ones.” I’m leading a project at the moment which is scheduled to launch in January 2019. It’s potentially going to be used by hundreds of people in the MVP, and then thousands (and maybe hundreds of thousands) after that.
Yet, when I was asked recently whether I’d like more resources, I said “after the summer”. Why? Because every time you add someone new, it temporarily slows down your project. The same can be true when you’re coming up with ideas. You can go faster alone, but further together.
Indeed a study found that “solitude can facilitate creativity–first, by stimulating imaginative involvement in multiple realities and, second, by ‘trying on’ alternative identities, leading, perhaps, to self-transformation.”
Essentially just being around other people can keep creative people from thinking new thoughts. I think this article goes a little too far in discounting the value of collaboration. For example, here’s three types of facilitated thinking that I have experience with that work well for both introverts and extroverts:
Design thinking has a bias towards action: it resists talking yourself out of trying something radical. Creating prototypes helps you to think about your idea in a concrete manner, and get it to test before it gets dumbed down. Chances are, that crazy idea you had will get toned down if you let too many people look at it. Protect the radical and push it hard!
Source: Paul Taylor (via Stowe Boyd)
I subscribe to both Seth Godin’s blog and his podcast, Akimbo. The man’s a genius as far as I’m concerned.
One of his most recent posts is about productivity:
And yet, we hardly talk about productivity.
Productivity is the amount of useful output created for every hour of work we do.
You can measure that output in money if you want to (it makes the math easier) but in fact, it’s everything from lives changed to knowledge shared. What matters is the answer to a simple question: did I spend my day producing enough benefit for all the time invested? So far, standard stuff. What I like is the way he applies it to our current situation in 2018:
Because we associate busyness with business with productivity. In my twenties, when I worked in schools, I worked 12+ hours every day. Now I work half that. Why? Because I work from home and can manage my own time. I’m rarely just waiting around or kicking my heels:
“To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.” (Marc Andreessen)
I first mentioned so-called ‘assassination markets’ in one of my weeknotes back in 2015 when reporting back on a dinner party conversation. For those unfamiliar, the idea has been around for at least the last twenty years.
Here’s how Wikipedia defines them:
Yet this market exists, and, though not the most popular bet on Augur, more than 50 shares have been traded on it as of the time of writing. Similar markets, moreover, exist for a number of other public figures, allowing users to gamble on whether 96-year-old actress Betty White and U.S. Senator John McCain — who has been diagnosed with brain cancer — will survive until Jan. 1, 2019. This is why ethics in technology are important. There is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ technology:
The core issue stems from the fact that, in addition to the pure revulsion that these markets should engender in any decent human being, they also create a financial incentive for someone to place a large bet that a public figure will be assassinated and then murder that person for profit. Consequently, the mere presence of these markets makes it more likely that these events will occur, however slim that increase may be. Interesting times, indeed.
Source: CCN
As I get older, I’m more aware that some things I do are very affected by the world around me. For example, since finding out that the intensity of light you experience during the day is correlated with the amount of sleep you get, I don’t feel so bad about ‘sleeping in’ during the summer months.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that this article in The New York Times suggests that there’s a good and a bad time to eat:
That pattern of eating, he says, conflicts with our biological rhythms. So when should we eat? As early as possible in the day, it would seem:
Source: The New York Times
Just like Facebook, I’ve deleted my LinkedIn account a couple of times. The difference is that I keep coming back to LinkedIn for some reason, while I’m a very happy non-user of Facebook.
This article imagines LinkedIn as a ‘game’ that you can win or lose. The framing is both hilarious and insightful, with the subtitle reading, “A strategy guide for using a semi-pointless social network in all the wrong ways.”
The general goal of LinkedIn (the game) is to find and connect with as many people on LinkedIn (the website) as possible, in order to secure vaguely defined social capital and potentially further one’s career, which allows the player to purchase consumer goods of gradually increasing quality. Like many games, it has dubious real-life utility. The site’s popularity and success, like that of many social networks, depends heavily on obfuscating this fact. This illusion of importance creates a sense of naive trust among its users. This makes it easy to exploit. Yep, LinkedIn makes its money in a similar way to Facebook: allow users to create contacts on a platform completely owned by one company (which is now Microsoft). Then, charge them to beat the algorithm you created.
Some people I know pay for LinkedIn Premium. I’ve never understood why when it’s effectively the front end for an address book. Instead, I pay for FullContact, which is a much better deal, long-term.
Nevertheless, if you’re playing the LinkedIn game, here’s what to do:
Source: The Outline
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My kids will often ask me about what I was like at their age. It might be about how fast I swam a couple of length freestyle, it could be what music I was into, or when I went on a particular holiday I mentioned in passing. Of course, as I didn’t keep a diary as a child, these questions are almost impossible to answer. I simply can’t remember how old I was when certain things happened.
Over and above that, though, there’s some things that I’ve just completely forgotten. I only realise this when I see, hear, or perhaps smell something that reminds me of a thing that my conscious mind had chosen to leave behind. It’s particularly true of experiences from when we are very young. This phenomenon is known as ‘childhood amnesia’, as an article in Nautilus explains:
In the last few years, scientists have finally started to unravel precisely what is happening in the brain around the time that we forsake recollection of our earliest years. “What we are adding to the story now is the biological basis,” says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. This new science suggests that as a necessary part of the passage into adulthood, the brain must let go of much of our childhood. Interestingly, our seven year-old daughter is on the cusp of this forgetting. She’s slowly forgetting things that she had no problem recalling even last year, and has to be prompted by photographs of the event or experience.
Source: Nautilus
My kids will often ask me about what I was like at their age. It might be about how fast I swam a couple of length freestyle, it could be what music I was into, or when I went on a particular holiday I mentioned in passing. Of course, as I didn’t keep a diary as a child, these questions are almost impossible to answer. I simply can’t remember how old I was when certain things happened.
Over and above that, though, there’s some things that I’ve just completely forgotten. I only realise this when I see, hear, or perhaps smell something that reminds me of a thing that my conscious mind had chosen to leave behind. It’s particularly true of experiences from when we are very young. This phenomenon is known as ‘childhood amnesia’, as an article in Nautilus explains:
In the last few years, scientists have finally started to unravel precisely what is happening in the brain around the time that we forsake recollection of our earliest years. “What we are adding to the story now is the biological basis,” says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. This new science suggests that as a necessary part of the passage into adulthood, the brain must let go of much of our childhood. Interestingly, our seven year-old daughter is on the cusp of this forgetting. She’s slowly forgetting things that she had no problem recalling even last year, and has to be prompted by photographs of the event or experience.
Source: Nautilus
I work from home, but travel quite a bit for the kind of work I do. I’ve noticed how, after three weeks of being based at home, I get restless. The four walls of my home office get a little bit stifling, even if I do augment them with the occasional working visit to the local coffee shop.
Work travel is, of course, different to holiday/vacation. However, as I write this from Montana, USA, I’m reminded how easy it is to slip into the mindset of how travel or money or a relationship can solve your problems in life.
This heavily-illustrated article is a good reminder that your need to sort out your life is independent from external things, including travel.
The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you not be harmed.
Aiming therefore at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself to be carried, even with a slight tendency, towards the attainment of lesser things. Instead, you must entirely quit some things and for the present postpone the rest. But if you would both have these great things, along with power and riches, then you will not gain even the latter, because you aim at the former too: but you will absolutely fail of the former, by which alone happiness and freedom are achieved.
Work, therefore to be able to say to every harsh appearance, “You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.” And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you. The only thing that can make you happy, calm, and contented is controlling your reactions to external prompts. That’s it. But it takes a lifetime to figure out.
Source: More To That
I work from home, but travel quite a bit for the kind of work I do. I’ve noticed how, after three weeks of being based at home, I get restless. The four walls of my home office get a little bit stifling, even if I do augment them with the occasional working visit to the local coffee shop.
Work travel is, of course, different to holiday/vacation. However, as I write this from Montana, USA, I’m reminded how easy it is to slip into the mindset of how travel or money or a relationship can solve your problems in life.
This heavily-illustrated article is a good reminder that your need to sort out your life is independent from external things, including travel.
The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you not be harmed.
Aiming therefore at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself to be carried, even with a slight tendency, towards the attainment of lesser things. Instead, you must entirely quit some things and for the present postpone the rest. But if you would both have these great things, along with power and riches, then you will not gain even the latter, because you aim at the former too: but you will absolutely fail of the former, by which alone happiness and freedom are achieved.
Work, therefore to be able to say to every harsh appearance, “You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.” And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you. The only thing that can make you happy, calm, and contented is controlling your reactions to external prompts. That’s it. But it takes a lifetime to figure out.
Source: More To That
In this article, Don Norman (famous for his seminal work The Design of Everyday Things) takes to task our technology-centric view of the world:
Consider the words we use to describe the result: human error, distraction, lack of attention, sloppiness–all negative terms, all implying the inferiority of people. Distraction, in particular, is the byword of the day–responsible for everything from poor interpersonal relationships to car accidents. But what does the term really mean? It’s a good article, particularly at a time when we’re thinking about robots and artificial intelligence replacing humans in the jobs market. It certainly made me think about my technology choices.
Source: Fast Company
“Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.” (Henry David Thoreau)
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” (Lawrence Pearsall Jacks)
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” (Lawrence Pearsall Jacks)
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“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” (Pablo Picasso)
One of the reasons I’ve retreated from Twitter since May of last year is the rise of angry politics. I can’t pay attention to everything that’s happening all of the time. And I certainly haven’t got the energy to deal with problems that aren’t materially affecting me or the people I care about.
Brexit, then, is a strange one. On the one hand, I participated in a democratic election to elect a government. Subsequently, a government formed from a party I didn’t vote for called a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union. As we all know, the result was close, and based on lies and illegal funding. Nevertheless, perhaps as a citizen I should participate democratically and then get on with my own life.
On the other hand of course, this isn’t politics as usual. There’s been a rise in nationalistic fervour that we haven’t seen since the 1930s. It’s alarming, particularly at a time when smartphones, social media, and the ever-increasing speed of the news cycle make it difficult for citizens to pay sustained attention to anything.
This article in The New York Times zooms out from the particular issues of Trump and Brexit to look at the wider picture. It’s not mentioned specifically in the article, but documentary evidence of struggles around political power and sovereignty goes back at leats to the Magna Carta in England. One way of looking at that is that King John was the Donald Trump of his time, so the barons took power from him.
It’s easy to stand for the opposite of something: you don’t have to do any of the work. All that’s necessary is to point out problems, flaws, and issues with the the person, organisation, or concept that you’re attacking. So demagogues and iconoclasts such as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, whose lack of a coherent position wouldn’t work at any other time, all of a sudden gain credibility in times of upheaval.
My concern about getting angry in bite-sized chunks on Twitter or reducing your issues with someone like Trump or Johnson to a placard is that you’re playing them at their own game. They’ll win. They thrive on the oxygen of attention. Cut it off and they’ll whither and be forced to slink off to whatever hole they originally crawled from.
[…]
The more extreme fringes of British conservatism have now reached the point that American conservatives first arrived at during the Clinton administration: They are seeking to undermine the very possibility of workable government. For hard-liners such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, it is an article of faith that Britain’s Treasury Department, the Bank of England and Downing Street itself are now conspiring to deny Britain its sovereignty. What we’re talking about here is ideology. There’s always been a fundamental difference between the left and the right of politics in a way that’s understood enough not to get into here. But issues around sovereignty, nationalism, and self-determinism actually cut across the traditional political spectrum. That’s why, for example, Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party, can oppose the EU for vastly different reasons to Jacob Rees-Mogg, arch-Brexiteer.
I haven’t got the energy to go into it here, but to me the crisis in confidence in expertise comes from a warping of the meritocratic system that was supposed to emancipate the working class, break down class structures, and bring forth a fairer society. What’s actually happened is that the political elites have joined with the wealthy to own the means of cultural reproduction. As a result, no-one now seems to trust them.
Source: The New York Times
“When we speak of ‘populism’ today, we sometimes mean nothing more than a politics that is audible as well as intelligible to the man in the street - or, to be precise, the man and woman slumped on their sofa, their attention skipping fitfully from flat-screen TV to laptop to smartphone to tablet and back to television, or the man and woman at work, sitting in front of desktop PCs but mostly exchanging suggestive personal messages on their smartphones.” (Niall Ferguson)
I couldn’t be happier about this news. Write.as is a service that allows you to connect multiple blogs to one online editor. You then compose your post and then decide where to send it.
Matt Baer, the guy behind Write.as, has announced some exciting new functionality:
So far, most developers in the fediverse have been remaking centralized web services with ActivityPub support. There’s PeerTube for video, PixelFed for social photos, Plume or Microblog.pub for blogging, and of course Mastodon and Pleroma for microblogging — among many others. I’ve loved watching the ecosystem grow over the past several months, but I also think more can be done, and getting AP support in Write.as was the first step to making this happen. Baer references one of his previous posts where, like the main developer of Mastodon, he takes a stand against some things that people have come to expect from centralised services:
Baer is planning a new product called Read.as:
Source: Write.as
In this post, Austin Kleon, backpedaling a little from the approach he seemed to promote in Show Your Work!, talks about the problems we all face with ‘living in public’.
I still publish my work, including Thought Shrapnel posts, to Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It’s just not where I spend most of my time. On balance, I’m happier for it.
Source: Austin Kleon
In this post, Austin Kleon, backpedaling a little from the approach he seemed to promote in Show Your Work!, talks about the problems we all face with ‘living in public’.
I still publish my work, including Thought Shrapnel posts, to Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It’s just not where I spend most of my time. On balance, I’m happier for it.
Source: Austin Kleon
This is a long essay in which the RSA announces that, along with its partners (one of which, inevitably, is Google) it’s launching the Future Work Centre. I’ve only selected quotations from the first section here.
The main problems outlined with the current economy which is being ‘disrupted’ by technology are:
I feel like warnings such as ‘the robots are coming’ and ‘be careful not to choose an easily-automated occupation!’ are a smokescreen for decisions that people are making about the kind of society they want to live in. It seems like that’s one where most of us (the ‘have nots’) are expendable, while the 0.01% (the ‘haves’) live in historically-unparalleled luxury.
Source: The RSA
This is a long essay in which the RSA announces that, along with its partners (one of which, inevitably, is Google) it’s launching the Future Work Centre. I’ve only selected quotations from the first section here.
The main problems outlined with the current economy which is being ‘disrupted’ by technology are:
I feel like warnings such as ‘the robots are coming’ and ‘be careful not to choose an easily-automated occupation!’ are a smokescreen for decisions that people are making about the kind of society they want to live in. It seems like that’s one where most of us (the ‘have nots’) are expendable, while the 0.01% (the ‘haves’) live in historically-unparalleled luxury.
Source: The RSA
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“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.” (Terry Pratchett)
“If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.” (Albert Einstein)
I usually limit myself to three quotations in posts I write here. I’m going to break that self-imposed rule for this article by Erika Christakis in The Atlantic on parents' screentime.
Christakis points out the good and the bad news:
I’ve given the example before of my father sitting down to read the newspaper on a Sunday. Is there really much difference to the child, I’ve wondered, between his being hidden behind a broadsheet for an hour, and his scrolling and clicking on a mobile device? In some ways yes, in some ways no.
Source: The Atlantic (via Jocelyn K. Glei)
I usually limit myself to three quotations in posts I write here. I’m going to break that self-imposed rule for this article by Erika Christakis in The Atlantic on parents' screentime.
Christakis points out the good and the bad news:
I’ve given the example before of my father sitting down to read the newspaper on a Sunday. Is there really much difference to the child, I’ve wondered, between his being hidden behind a broadsheet for an hour, and his scrolling and clicking on a mobile device? In some ways yes, in some ways no.
Source: The Atlantic (via Jocelyn K. Glei)
I like Cory Doctorow. He’s a gifted communicator who wears his heart on his sleeve. In this article, he talks about Facebook and how what it’s wrought is a result of the corruption at its very heart.
But while the acknowledgment of the problem of Big Tech is most welcome, I am worried that the diagnosis is wrong.
The problem is that we’re confusing automated persuasion with automated targeting. Laughable lies about Brexit, Mexican rapists, and creeping Sharia law didn’t convince otherwise sensible people that up was down and the sky was green.
Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros. So, for example, people seem to think that Facebook advertisement caused people to vote for Trump. As if they were going to vote for someone else, and then changed their mind as a direct result of viewing ads. That’s not how it works.
Companies such as Cambridge Analytica might claim that they can rig elections and change people’s minds, but they’re not actually that sophisticated.
This isn’t to say that persuasion is impossible. Automated disinformation campaigns can flood the channel with contradictory, seemingly plausible accounts for the current state of affairs, making it hard for a casual observer to make sense of events. Long-term repetition of a consistent narrative, even a manifestly unhinged one, can create doubt and find adherents – think of climate change denial, or George Soros conspiracies, or the anti-vaccine movement.
These are long, slow processes, though, that make tiny changes in public opinion over the course of years, and they work best when there are other conditions that support them – for example, fascist, xenophobic, and nativist movements that are the handmaidens of austerity and privation. When you don’t have enough for a long time, you’re ripe for messages blaming your neighbors for having deprived you of your fair share. Advertising and influencing works best when you provide a message that people already agree with in a way that they can easily share with others. The ‘long, slow processes’ that Doctorow refers to have been practised offline as well (think of Nazi propaganda, for example). Dark adverts on Facebook are tapping into feelings and reactions that aren’t peculiar to the digital world.
Facebook has thrived by providing ways for people to connect and communicate with one another. Unfortunately, because they’re so focused on profit over people, they’ve done a spectacularly bad job at making sure that the spaces in which people connect are healthy spaces that respect democracy.
Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters. That last phrase is right on the money.
Source: Locus magazine
I like Cory Doctorow. He’s a gifted communicator who wears his heart on his sleeve. In this article, he talks about Facebook and how what it’s wrought is a result of the corruption at its very heart.
But while the acknowledgment of the problem of Big Tech is most welcome, I am worried that the diagnosis is wrong.
The problem is that we’re confusing automated persuasion with automated targeting. Laughable lies about Brexit, Mexican rapists, and creeping Sharia law didn’t convince otherwise sensible people that up was down and the sky was green.
Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros. So, for example, people seem to think that Facebook advertisement caused people to vote for Trump. As if they were going to vote for someone else, and then changed their mind as a direct result of viewing ads. That’s not how it works.
Companies such as Cambridge Analytica might claim that they can rig elections and change people’s minds, but they’re not actually that sophisticated.
This isn’t to say that persuasion is impossible. Automated disinformation campaigns can flood the channel with contradictory, seemingly plausible accounts for the current state of affairs, making it hard for a casual observer to make sense of events. Long-term repetition of a consistent narrative, even a manifestly unhinged one, can create doubt and find adherents – think of climate change denial, or George Soros conspiracies, or the anti-vaccine movement.
These are long, slow processes, though, that make tiny changes in public opinion over the course of years, and they work best when there are other conditions that support them – for example, fascist, xenophobic, and nativist movements that are the handmaidens of austerity and privation. When you don’t have enough for a long time, you’re ripe for messages blaming your neighbors for having deprived you of your fair share. Advertising and influencing works best when you provide a message that people already agree with in a way that they can easily share with others. The ‘long, slow processes’ that Doctorow refers to have been practised offline as well (think of Nazi propaganda, for example). Dark adverts on Facebook are tapping into feelings and reactions that aren’t peculiar to the digital world.
Facebook has thrived by providing ways for people to connect and communicate with one another. Unfortunately, because they’re so focused on profit over people, they’ve done a spectacularly bad job at making sure that the spaces in which people connect are healthy spaces that respect democracy.
Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters. That last phrase is right on the money.
Source: Locus magazine
This article on Recode, which accompanies one of their podcast episodes, features some thoughts from Adam Grant, psychologist and management expert. A couple of things he says chime with my experience of going into a lot of organisations as a consultant, too:
Another thing that Grant complains about is the idea of ‘cultural fit’. I can see why organisations do this as, after all, you do have to get on and work with the people you’re hiring. However, as he explains, it’s a self-defeating approach:
Recode (via Stowe Boyd)
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The older I get, the less important I realise things are that I deemed earlier in life. For example, the main thing in life seems to be to find something you can find interesting to work on for a long period of time. That’s unlikely to be a ‘job’ but more like a problem to be solved values to exemplify and share.
Jason Fried writes on his company’s blog about the journey that they’ve taken over the last 19 years. Everyone knows Basecamp because it’s been around for as long as you’ve been on the web.
We rush around the place trying to be like other people and organisations, when we need to think about what who and what we’re trying to be. The way to ‘win’ at life and business is to still be doing what you enjoy and deem important when everyone else has crashed and burned.
Source: Signal v. Noise
I’m a big fan of sleep. Since buying a smartwatch earlier this year, I’ve been wearing it all of the time, including in bed at night. What I’ve found is that I’m actually a good sleeper, regularly sleeping better than 95% of other people who use the same Mi Fit app.
Like most people, after a poor night’s sleep I’m not at my best the next day. This article by Ed Yong in The Atlantic helps explain why.
During that state, the brain replays memories. For example, the same neurons that fired when a rat ran through a maze during the day will spontaneously fire while it sleeps at night, in roughly the same order. These reruns help to consolidate and strengthen newly formed memories, integrating them into existing knowledge. But Lewis explains that they also help the brain extract generalities from specifics—an idea that others have also supported. We’ve known for generations that, if we’ve got a problem to solve or a decision to make, that it’s a good idea to ‘sleep on it’. Science is catching up with folk wisdom.
“The obvious implication is that if you’re working on a difficult problem, allow yourself enough nights of sleep,” she adds. “Particularly if you’re trying to work on something that requires thinking outside the box, maybe don’t do it in too much of a rush.” As the article states, there’s further research to be done here. But, given that sleep (along with exercise and nutrition) is one of the three ‘pillars’ of productivity, this certainly chimes with my experience.
Source: The Atlantic
This post is from Albert Wenger, a partner a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. It’s taken from his book World After Capital, currently in draft form.
In this section, Wenger is concerned with attention scarcity, which he believes to be both a threat to humanity, and an opportunity for us.
Source: Continuations
Apple is touting a new feature in the latest version of iOS that helps you reduce the amount of time you spend on your smartphone. Facebook are doing something similar. As this article in The New York Times notes, that’s no accident:
Screens are insatiable. At a cognitive level, they are voracious vampires for your attention, and as soon as you look at one, you are basically toast. It’s not enough to tell people not to do things. Technology can be addictive, just like anything else, so we need to find better ways of achieving similar ends.
Source: The New York Times
This study featured on the blog of the Stanford Graduate School of Business talks about the difference between hierarchical and non-hierarchical structures. It cites work by Lisanne van Bunderen from University of Amsterdam, who found that egalitarianism seemed to lead to better performance:
Source: Stanford Graduate School of Business (via Stowe Boyd)
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Alberto Corado, Moodle’s UX Lead, sent me an article by Rebecca Guthrie entitled Crawl, Walk, Run. It’s contains good, concise, advice in three parts:
What I think we can do is create clickable prototypes using something like Adobe XD, which allows users to give feedback on specific features. We can use this UX feedback to create an approach ready for when the technical architecture is built.
Food for thought, certainly.
Source: Rebecca Guthrie
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the most useful applications of blockchain technologies are incredibly boring. That goes in education, too.
This post by Chris Fellingham considers blockchain in the context of Higher Education, and in particular credentialing:
Fellingham mentions someone called ‘Smolenski’ who, after a little bit of digging, must be Natalie Smolenski, who works for Learning Machine. That organisation is a driving force, with MIT, behind the Blockcerts standard for blockchain-based digital credentialing.
Blockchain at this moment is a kind of religion. It’s based on a hope of things to come:
Source: Chris Fellingham (via Stephen Downes)
The design blog Dezeen picks up on a report from an Australian firm of architects, demonstrating that ‘Instagrammable moments’ are now part of their brief.
I’m all for user stories and creating personas but one case looks like grounds for divorce, Bob is seen as the servant of Michelle, who wants to be photographed doing things she’s seen others doing
While Bob wants to surf, drink beer and spend quality time with Michelle, she wants to “be pampered and live the Instagram life of fresh coconuts and lounging by the pool.”
In response to this type of user, designers should focus on providing what Michelle wants, since “Bob’s main job this holiday is to take pictures of Michelle.”
“Michelle wants pictures of herself in the pool, of bright colours, and of fresh attractive food,” the report says. “You’ll also find her taking pictures of remarkable indoor and outdoor artwork like murals or inspirational signage." It’s easy to roll your eyes at this (and trust me, mine are almost rotating out of their sockets) but the historian in me finds this fascinating. I wonder if future generations will realise that architectural details were a result of photos been taken for a particular service?
Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger told Dezeen that he had noticed that the platform was influencing interior design. Of course, architects and designers have to start somewhere and perhaps ‘instagrammability’ is a useful creative constraint.
Instagram was placed at number 66 in the latest Dezeen Hot List of the most newsworthy forces in world design. Now that I’ve read this, I’ll be noticing this everywhere, no doubt.
Source: Dezeen
This is interesting, given that Google was welcomed with open arms in London:
The problem that I have with ‘replacing’ Google services is that it’s usually non-trivial for less technical users to achieve. As the authors of the wiki point out:
While presenting these “alternatives” or “replacements” here, we must keep in mind that the true goal is to achieve proper distribution/decentralization of information and communication, and empower people to understand and control where their information goes. The two biggest problems with the project of removing big companies such as Google from our lives, are: (i) using web services is a social thing, and (ii) they provide such high quality services for so little financial cost.
Whether you’re using a social network to connect with friends or working with colleagues on a collaborative document, your choices aren’t solely yours. We negotiate the topography of the web at the same time as weaving the social fabric of society. It’s not enough to give people alternatives, there has to be some leadership to go with it.
Source: Fuck off Google wiki
“Search for the seed of good in every adversity. Master that principle and you will own a precious shield that will guard you well through all the darkest valleys you must traverse. Stars may be seen from the bottom of a deep well, when they cannot be discerned from the mountaintop. So will you learn things in adversity that you would never have discovered without trouble. There is always a seed of good. Find it and prosper.” (Og Mandino)
In my TEDx talk six years ago, I explained how the understanding and remixing of memes was a great way to develop digital literacies. At that time, they were beginning to be used in advertisements. Now, as we saw with Brexit and the most recent US Presidential election, they’ve become weaponised.
This article in the MIT Technology Review references one of my favourite websites, knowyourmeme.com, which tracks the origin and influence of various memes across the web. Researchers have taken 700,000 images from this site and used an algorithm to track their spread and development. In addition, they gathered 100 million images from other sources.
The team let their algorithm loose on a database of over 100 million images gathered from communities known to generate memes, such as Reddit and its subgroup The_Donald, Twitter, 4chan’s politically incorrect forum known as /pol/, and a relatively new social network called Gab that was set up to accommodate users who had been banned from other communities. Whereas some things ‘go viral’ by accident and catch the original author(s) off-guard, some communities are very good at making memes that spread quickly.
They also point out that “/pol/ and Gab share hateful and racist memes at a higher rate than mainstream communities,” including large numbers of anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi memes.
Seemingly neutral memes can also be “weaponized” by mixing them with other messages. For example, the “Pepe the Frog” meme has been used in this way to create politically active, racist, and anti-Semitic messages. It turns out that, just like in evolutionary biology, creating a large number of variants is likely to lead to an optimal solution for a given environment.
That immediately suggests a strategy for anybody wanting to become more influential: set up a meme factory that produces large numbers of variants of other memes. Every now and again, this process is bound to produce a hit.
For any evolutionary biologist, that may sound familiar. Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine a process that treats pHashes like genomes and allows them to evolve through mutation, reproduction, and selection. As the article states, right now it’s humans creating these memes. However, it won’t be long until we have machines doing this automatically. After all, it’s been five years since the controversy about the algorithmically-created “Keep Calm and…” t-shirts for sale on Amazon.
It’s an interesting space to watch, particularly for those interested in digital literacies (and democracy).
Source: MIT Technology Review
Sometimes I’m reminded of the fact that I haven’t checked in with someone’s worth for a few weeks, months, or even years. I’m continually impressed with the work of my near-namesake Dougald Hine. I hope to meet him in person one day.
Going back through his recent work led me to a long article in Eurozine by David Graeber and David Wengrow about how we tend to frame history incorrectly.
If so, then the real question is not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’, but, having lived so much of our history moving back and forth between different political systems, ‘how did we get so stuck?’ Definitely worth a read, particularly if you think that ‘anarchy’ is the opposite of ‘civilisation’.
Source: Eurozine (via Dougald Hine)
Image CC BY-NC-SA xina
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“You needn’t settle for a mediocre life just because the people around you did.”
(Joshua Fields Millburn)
This week, tens of thousands of open source projects migrated their codebase away from GitHub to alternatives such as GitLab. Why? Because Microsoft announced that they’ve bought GitHub for $7.5 billion.
For those who don’t spend time in the heady world of software and web development, that sounds like a lot of money for something with a silly name. It will hopefully make things a little clearer to explain that Git is described by Wikipedia in the following way:
I’ve seen lots of reactions to the Microsoft acquistion news, but one of the more insightful posts comes from Louis-Philippe Véronneau. Like me, he doesn’t trust Microsoft at all.
Let us take a moment to remind ourselves that:
I’m thankful that we’re now starting the MoodleNet project in a post-GDPR and post-GitHub world. We’ll be using GitLab — initially via their hosted service, but longer-term as a self-hosted solution — and as many open-source products and services as possible.
Interestingly, Véronneau notes that you can use Debian’s infrastructure (terms) or RiseUp’s infrastructure (terms) if your project aligns with their ethos.
Source: Louis-Philippe Véronneau
“One who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.”
(Confucius)
I’m reading Adam Greenfield’s excellent book Radical Technologies: the design of everyday life at the moment. He says:
The problem with blockchain technologies is that they tend to all get lumped together as if they’re one thing. For example, some use blockchain technologies to prop-up neoliberalism, whereas others are seeking to use it to destroy it.
As part of my research for a presentation I gave in Barcelona last year about decentralised technologies, I came across MaidSafe (“the world’s first autonomous data network”). I admit to be on the edges of my understanding here, but the idea is that the SAFE network can safely store data in an autonomous, decentralised way.
Last week, MaidSafe announced a new protocol called PARSEC (Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus). It solves the Byzantine General’s problem without recourse to the existing blockchain approach.
[…]
So despite being big fans of blockchain technology for many reasons here at MaidSafe, the reality is that the data and communications networks of the future will see millions or even billions of transactions per second taking place. No matter which type of blockchain implementation you take — tweaking the quantity and distribution of nodes across the network or how many people are in control of these across a variety of locations — at the end of the day, the blockchain itself remains, by definition, a single centralised record. And for the use cases that we’re working on, blockchain technology comes with limitations of transactions-per-second that simply makes that sort of centralisation unworkable. I confess to not having watched the hour-long YouTube video embedded in the post but, if PARSEC works, it’s another step towards a post-nation state world — for better or worse.
Source: MaidSafe blog
It’s taken me a long time to admit it to myself (and my wife) but while I don’t currently suffer from depression, I do live with a low-level general background anxiety that seems to have developed during my adult life.
Wil Wheaton, “actor, blogger, voice actor and writer” and all-round darling of the internet has written in the last few days about his struggles with mental health. My experiences aren’t as extreme as his — I’ve never had panic attacks, and being based from home has made my working life more manageable — but I do relate.
This, in particular, resonated with me from what Wheaton had to say:
We like to think we can control everything in our lives. We can’t.
And yet, out of nowhere, a couple of times a month come waves of feelings that I can’t quite describe. They loom. Everything is not right with the world. It makes no sense to say that they don’t have a particular object or focus, but they really don’t. I can’t put my finger on them or turn what it feels like into words.
Wheaton suggests that often the things we don’t feel like doing in these situations are exactly the things we need to do:
What I really appreciate in Wheaton’s article, which was an address he gave to NAMI (the American National Alliance on Mental Illness), was that he focused on the experience of undiagnosed children. It’s hard enough as an adult to realise what’s going on, so for children it must be pretty terrible.
If you’re reading this and suffer from anxiety and/or depression, let’s remember it’s 2018. It’s time to open up about all this stuff. And, as Wheaton reminds us, let’s talk to our children about this, too. The chances are that what you’re living with is genetic, so your kids will also have to deal with this at some point.
Source: Wil Wheaton
I confess to not have heard of Abby Wambach, a recently-retired US soccer player, until Laura Hilliger brought her to my attention in the form of Wambach’s commencement speech to the graduates of Barnard College.
The whole thing is a fantastic call to action, particularly for women, but I wanted to call out a couple of bits in particular:
You can’t be a leader at work without being a leader at home. And by ‘leader’ I don’t think Wambach is talking about ‘bossing’ everyone, but about stepping up, being counted, and supporting/representing others.
She also writes:
Source: Barnard College (via Freshly Brewed Thoughts)
Over the last 15 years that I’ve been in the workplace, I’ve worked in a variety of organisations. One thing I’ve found is that those that are poor at change management are sub-standard in other ways. That makes sense, of course, because life = change.
There’s a whole host of ways to understand change within organisations. Some people seem to think that applying the same template everywhere leads to good outcomes. They’re often management consultants. Others think that every context is so different that you just have to go with your gut.
I’m of the opinion that there are heuristics we can use to make our lives easier. Yes, every situation and every organisation is different, but that doesn’t mean we can’t apply some rules of thumb. That’s why I like this ‘Managing Complex Change Model’ from Lippitt (1987), which I discovered by going down a rabbithole on a blog post from Tom Critchlow to a blog called ‘Intense Minimalism’.
The diagram, included above is commented upon by Davide ‘Folletto’ Casali, author of Intense Minimalism. Casali notes:
Source: Intense Minimalism (via Tom Critchlow)
When I was four years old we moved to the North East of England. Soon after, my parents took my grandmother, younger sister (still in a pushchair) and me to the Quayside market in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
There’s still some disagreement as to how exactly it happened, but after buying a toy monkey that wrapped around my neck using velcro, I got lost. It’s a long time ago, but I can vaguely remember my decision that, if I couldn’t find my parents or grandmother, I’d probably better head back to the car. So I did.
45 minutes later, and after the police had been called, my parents found me and my monkey sitting on the bonnet of our family car. I can still remember the registration number of that orange Ford Escort: MAT 474 V.
Now, 33 years later, we’re still not great at ensuring children don’t get lost. Yes, we have more of a culture of ensuring children don’t go out of our sight, and give kids smartphones at increasingly-young ages, but we can do much better.
That’s why I thought this Lynq tracker, currently being crowdfunded via Indiegogo was such a great idea. You can get the gist by watching the promo video:
Our family is off for two weeks around Europe this summer. While we’ve been a couple of times before, both involved taking our car and camping. This time, we’re interrailing and Airbnbing our way around, which increases the risk that one of our children gets lost.
Lync looks really simple and effective to use, but isn’t going to be shipping until November, — otherwise I would have backed this in an instant.
Source: The Verge
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Facebook’s motto, until recently, was “move fast and break things”. This chimed with a wider Silicon Valley brogrammer mentality of “f*ck it, ship it”.
NASA’s approach, as this (long-ish) Fast Company article explains, couldn’t be more different to the Silicon Valley narrative. The author, Charles Fishman, explains that the group who write the software for space shuttles are exceptional at what they do. And they don’t even start writing code until they’ve got a complete plan in place.
Bill Pate, who’s worked on the space flight software over the last 22 years, [/url]says the group understands the stakes: “If the software isn’t perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die. Software powers everything. It’s in your watch, your television, and your car. Yet the quality of most software is pretty poor.
John Munson, a software engineer and professor of computer science at the University of Idaho, is not quite so generous. “Cave art,” he says. “It’s primitive. We supposedly teach computer science. There’s no science here at all.” The NASA team can sum-up their process in four propositions:
Source: Fast Company
I’ve written about this before, but this HBR article explains that successful teams require both psychological safety and cognitive diversity. Psychological safety is particularly important, I think, for remote workers:
Source: Harvard Business Review
“It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements."
(Marcus Aurelius)
Rolin Moe is in a good position to talk on the topic of ‘academic innovation’. In fact, it’s literally in his job title: ‘Assistant professor and Director of the Institute for Academic Innovation at Seattle Pacific University".
Moe warns, however, that it’s not necessarily a great idea to create a new discipline out of academic innovation. Until fairly recently, being ‘innovative’ was a negative slur, something that could get you in some serious trouble if you were found guilty.
This makes the term a conduit of power relationships despite many proponents of innovation serving as vocal advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education. Thinking about revenue shortfalls in a time of national economic prosperity, the extraction of arts and humanities programs at a time when industry demands critical thinking from graduates, and the positioning of online learning as a democratizing tool when research shows the greatest benefit is to populations of existing privilege, the solutions offered under the innovation mantle have at best affected symptoms, at worst perpetuated causes. Words and terms, of course, change over time. But, as Moe points out, if we’re to update the definition of innovation, we need a common understanding of what it means.
However, this cohesion assumes a “shared language of inquiry,” which does not currently exist. Today’s shared language around innovation is emotive rather than procedural; we use innovation to highlight the desired positive results of our efforts rather than to identify anything specific about our effort (products, processes or policies). The predominant use of innovation is to highlight the value and future-readiness of whatever the speaker supports, which is why opposite sides of issues in education (see school choice, personalized learning, etc.) use innovation in promoting their ideologies. It seems to me that the neoliberal agenda has invaded education, as it does with any uncommodified available space, and introduced the language of the market. So we get educators using the language of Silicon Valley and attempting to ‘disrupt’ their institution.
That definition must address the negotiated history of the term, from the earliest application of the concept in government-funded research spurred by education policy during the 1960s, through overlooked innovation authors like Freeman and Thorstein Veblen. Negotiating the future we want with the history we have is vital in order to determine the best structure to support the development of an inventive network for creating research-backed, criticism-engaged and outside-the-box approaches to the future of education. The energy behind what we today call academic innovation needs to be put toward problematizing and unraveling the causes of the obstacles facing the practice of educating people of competence and character, rather than focusing on the promotion of near-future technologies and their effect on symptomatic issues. While I’m sympathetic to the idea that educational institutions can be ‘stodgy’ places that can often need a good kick up the behind, I’m not entirely sure that academic innovation as a discipline will do anything other than legitimise the capitalist takeover of a public good.
Source: Inside Higher Ed (via Aaron Davis)
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
(Voltaire)
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time at the intersection of education and technology, it’s that nobody cares about the important stuff, but people will go crazy if you make a small tweak to an emoji icon. 🙄
The reason you can use any web browser you want to access this website is down to standards. These are collections of protocols that define expected behaviours when you use a web browser to read what I’ve written. There are organisations and working groups ensuring that the internet doesn’t devolve into the Wild West.
This post on the We Distribute blog is an interview with Mike Macgirvin who has spent much of his adult life working on the protocols that enable social interaction on the web to happen. It’s an important read, even for less-than-technical people, as it serves to explain some of the very human decisions that shape the technology that mediates our lives.
The level of specification needed to produce this higher quality protocol is a double-edged sword. If you specify things too rigidly, projects using this protocol cannot grow or extend beyond the limits and restrictions you have specified. If you do not specify the implementation rules tightly enough, you will end up with competing products or projects that can both claim to implement the specification, yet are unable to interoperate at a basic level. For-profit companies, and in particular those who are backed by venture capitalists, are very fond of what’s known as vendor lock-in. While there are moves afoot seeking to limit this, including those provided by GDPR, it’s a game of cat-and-mouse.
The free web, on the other hand, is different. It’s a place where, instead of being beholden to people trying to commodify and intermediate your interactions with other human beings, there is the free exchange of data and ideas.
Unfortunately, as Macgirvin points out, its much easier to enclose something than to ‘lock it open’:
I saw an even bigger problem. Twitter at the time was over capacity and often would be shut down for hours or a few days. What if you didn’t really want to permanently move to another server, but you just wanted to post something and stay in touch with friends/family when your server was having a bad day? This was the impetus for nomadic identity. You could take a thumbdrive and load it into any other server; and your identity is intact and you still have all your friends. Then we allowed you to “clone” your identity so you could have these backup accounts available at any time you needed them. Then we started syncing stuff between your clones so that on server ‘A’ you still have the same exact content and friends that you do on server ‘B’. They’re clones. You can post from either. If one shuts down forever, no big deal. If it has a cert issue that takes 24 hours to fix, no big deal. Your online life can continue, uninterrupted — no matter what happens to individual servers. The trouble, of course, with all of this, is that things aren’t important until they are. So if you’re using Twitter to share photos of what you had for breakfast or status updates about the facial expressions of your cat, you’re not so bothered if the service experiences some downtime. Fast forward a couple of years and emergency services are using it to reassure the citizenry in the face of impending doom.
Those out to make a profit from commodifying social interaction are like those on the political right; they’re more likely to rally behind one another in the name of capital. The left, in this case represented by the free web, is prone to internecine conflict due to their motivation being more ideological than financial.
Source: We Distribute
“To ramble across the countryside is to disembarrass oneself of the social and mental constraints with which one is encumbered by civilization."
(Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking, p.231)
I was part of the discussion that led to this post about Medium’s paywall. Richard Bartlett, whose work with Enspiral, Loomio, and decentralised organising I have huge respect for, has been experimenting with different options to support his work:
At the moment, I release microcasts as a supporter-only perk. However, given that Patreon allows ‘early access’ another approach would be to set everything on a delay. I’m still, like Bartlett, weighing up all of this, but for now Patreon seems like a great option.
Source: Richard D. Bartlett
“Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.” (Jane McGonigal)
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Some wise words in this article in The Guardian from Aditya Chakrabortty. Perhaps it’s my age, but I’m increasingly aware of the power that we have, collectively, around where and how we spend and save our money.
But we have a sovereign wealth fund already. It’s worth over £2tn and it’s called our pension funds. The big battle is to give us agency over our own savings, rather than leaving it all to some pinstriped manager on a fat commission. I have several pensions (Teachers' Pension, Local Government, personal, Moodle…) and, as much as I’m able, I ensure that the money is being ethically invested. There’s so many frontiers on which we can change the world, not all of them are super-exciting…
Source: The Guardian
I’m working with Outlandish this week, as part of a MoodleNet design sprint. One of their co-founders, Harry Robbins, is quoted in the latest issue of WIRED about the CoTech network of which Outlandish (and We Are Open), are part.
Source: WIRED
“We find very few sensible people except those who agree with our own opinion.” (François de La Rochefoucauld)
While there’s nothing worse than a pedantic philosopher (I’m looking at you Socrates) it’s definitely worth remembering that, as human beings, we’re subject to biases.
This long list of mental models from Farnam Street is worth going through. I particularly like Hanlon’s Razor:
Source: Farnam Street
As a small business owner and co-op founder, GDPR applies to me as much as everyone else. It’s a massive ballache, but I support the philosophy behind what it’s trying to achieve.
Source: The Verge
“Ability and greatness must be measured by virtue, not by good fortune.” (Baltasar Gracián)
Estonia is pretty much already the home of free public wifi, so this is a logical next step. The council of the capital city, Tallinn, provided free public transport to citizens for the last five years after a referdendum. Now the idea is to extend that to everyone — including tourists.
This article mainly comprises of an interview with Allan Alaküla, the Head of Tallinn European Union Office. He makes a couple of important points:
Source: Pop-Up City
I found this interesting:
Apple’s least-expensive phone didn’t prove very tough at all. In fact, the $399 iPhone SE was rendered unusable before all of the others. However, this was not a big surprise, as the newer iPhone 8 and iPhone X are made with much stronger glass than the iPhone SE’s from 2016. Summary:
This article by Eillie Anzilotti is a Fast Company ‘long read’. It’s US-focused and includes specific examples and case studies, but is, I think, more widely-applicable.
Anzilotti explains some of the benefits of worker-owned co-ops, which are increasing in number as the ‘baby boomer’ generation retires.
Source: Fast Company
This article by Eillie Anzilotti is a Fast Company ‘long read’. It’s US-focused and includes specific examples and case studies, but is, I think, more widely-applicable.
Anzilotti explains some of the benefits of worker-owned co-ops, which are increasing in number as the ‘baby boomer’ generation retires.
Source: Fast Company
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This article in Logic magazine was brought to my attention by a recent issue of Ian O’Byrne’s excellent TL;DR newsletter. It’s a long read, focusing on the structural power of internet giants such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
The author, K. Sabeel Rahman, is an assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He uses historical analogues to make his points, while noting how different the current state of affairs is from a century ago.
The problem, however, is not bigness per se. Even for Brandeisians, the central concern was power: the ability to arbitrarily influence the decisions and opportunities available to others. Such unchecked power represented a threat to liberty. Therefore, just as the power of the state had to be tamed through institutional checks and balances, so too did this private power have to be contested—controlled, held to account.
This emphasis on power and contestation, rather than literal bigness, helps clarify the ways in which technology’s particular relationship to scale poses a challenge to ideals of democracy, liberty, equality—and what to do about it. I think this is the thing that concerns me most. Just as the banks were ‘too big to fail’ during the economic crisis and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer, so huge technology companies are increasingly playing that kind of role elsewhere in our society.
These various mechanisms—regulatory oversight, antitrust laws, corporate governance, and the countervailing power of organized labor— together helped create a relatively tame, and economically dynamic, twentieth-century economy. But today, as technology creates new kinds of power and new kinds of scale, new variations on these strategies may be needed. “Arbitrary power is a threat to liberty.” Absolutely, no matter whether the company holding that power has been problematic in the past, has a slogan promising not to do anything wrong, or is well-liked by the public.
We need more than regulatory oversight of such organisations because of how insidious their power can be — much like the image of Luks' octopus that accompanies this and the original post.
Rahman explains three types of power held by large internet companies:
[…]
A second type of power arises from what we might think of as a gatekeeping power. Here, the issue is not necessarily that the firm controls the entire infrastructure of transmission, but rather that the firm controls the gateway to an otherwise decentralized and diffuse landscape.
This is one way to understand the Facebook News Feed, or Google Search. Google Search does not literally own and control the entire internet. But it is increasingly true that for most users, access to the internet is mediated through the gateway of Google Search or YouTube’s suggested videos. By controlling the point of entry, Google exercises outsized influence on the kinds of information and commerce that users can ultimately access—a form of control without complete ownership.
[…]
A third kind of power is scoring power, exercised by ratings systems, indices, and ranking databases. Increasingly, many business and public policy decisions are based on big data-enabled scoring systems. Thus employers will screen potential applicants for the likelihood that they may quit, be a problematic employee, or participate in criminal activity. Or judges will use predictive risk assessments to inform sentencing and bail decisions.
These scoring systems may seem objective and neutral, but they are built on data and analytics that bake into them existing patterns of racial, gender, and economic bias.
[…]
Each of these forms of power is infrastructural. Their impact grows as more and more goods and services are built atop a particular platform. They are also more subtle than explicit control: each of these types of power enable a firm to exercise tremendous influence over what might otherwise look like a decentralized and diffused system. As I quote Adam Greenfield as saying in Microcast #021 (supporters only!) this infrastructural power is less obvious because of the immateriality of the world controlled by internet giants. We need more than managerial approaches to solving the problems faced by their power.
One solution would be to convert some of these infrastructures into “public options”—publicly managed alternatives to private provision. Run by the state, these public versions could operate on equitable, inclusive, and nondiscriminatory principles. Public provision of these infrastructures would subject them to legal requirements for equal service and due process. Furthermore, supplying a public option would put competitive pressures on private providers.
[…]
We can also introduce structural limits on technologies with the goal of precluding dangerous concentrations of power. While much of the debate over big data and privacy has tended to emphasize the concerns of individuals, we might view a robust privacy regime as a kind of structural limit: if firms are precluded from collecting or using certain types of data, that limits the kinds of power they can exercise. Some of this is already happening, thankfully, through structural limitations such as GDPR. I hope this is the first step in a more coordinated response to internet giants who increasingly have more impact on the day-to-day lives of citizens than their governments.
Having just finished reading Utopia for Realists, I definitely think the left needs to think bigger than it’s currently doing, and really push that Overton window.
Source: Logic magazine (via Ian O’Byrne)
This article in Logic magazine was brought to my attention by a recent issue of Ian O’Byrne’s excellent TL;DR newsletter. It’s a long read, focusing on the structural power of internet giants such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
The author, K. Sabeel Rahman, is an assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He uses historical analogues to make his points, while noting how different the current state of affairs is from a century ago.
The problem, however, is not bigness per se. Even for Brandeisians, the central concern was power: the ability to arbitrarily influence the decisions and opportunities available to others. Such unchecked power represented a threat to liberty. Therefore, just as the power of the state had to be tamed through institutional checks and balances, so too did this private power have to be contested—controlled, held to account.
This emphasis on power and contestation, rather than literal bigness, helps clarify the ways in which technology’s particular relationship to scale poses a challenge to ideals of democracy, liberty, equality—and what to do about it. I think this is the thing that concerns me most. Just as the banks were ‘too big to fail’ during the economic crisis and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer, so huge technology companies are increasingly playing that kind of role elsewhere in our society.
These various mechanisms—regulatory oversight, antitrust laws, corporate governance, and the countervailing power of organized labor— together helped create a relatively tame, and economically dynamic, twentieth-century economy. But today, as technology creates new kinds of power and new kinds of scale, new variations on these strategies may be needed. “Arbitrary power is a threat to liberty.” Absolutely, no matter whether the company holding that power has been problematic in the past, has a slogan promising not to do anything wrong, or is well-liked by the public.
We need more than regulatory oversight of such organisations because of how insidious their power can be — much like the image of Luks' octopus that accompanies this and the original post.
Rahman explains three types of power held by large internet companies:
[…]
A second type of power arises from what we might think of as a gatekeeping power. Here, the issue is not necessarily that the firm controls the entire infrastructure of transmission, but rather that the firm controls the gateway to an otherwise decentralized and diffuse landscape.
This is one way to understand the Facebook News Feed, or Google Search. Google Search does not literally own and control the entire internet. But it is increasingly true that for most users, access to the internet is mediated through the gateway of Google Search or YouTube’s suggested videos. By controlling the point of entry, Google exercises outsized influence on the kinds of information and commerce that users can ultimately access—a form of control without complete ownership.
[…]
A third kind of power is scoring power, exercised by ratings systems, indices, and ranking databases. Increasingly, many business and public policy decisions are based on big data-enabled scoring systems. Thus employers will screen potential applicants for the likelihood that they may quit, be a problematic employee, or participate in criminal activity. Or judges will use predictive risk assessments to inform sentencing and bail decisions.
These scoring systems may seem objective and neutral, but they are built on data and analytics that bake into them existing patterns of racial, gender, and economic bias.
[…]
Each of these forms of power is infrastructural. Their impact grows as more and more goods and services are built atop a particular platform. They are also more subtle than explicit control: each of these types of power enable a firm to exercise tremendous influence over what might otherwise look like a decentralized and diffused system. As I quote Adam Greenfield as saying in Microcast #021 (supporters only!) this infrastructural power is less obvious because of the immateriality of the world controlled by internet giants. We need more than managerial approaches to solving the problems faced by their power.
One solution would be to convert some of these infrastructures into “public options”—publicly managed alternatives to private provision. Run by the state, these public versions could operate on equitable, inclusive, and nondiscriminatory principles. Public provision of these infrastructures would subject them to legal requirements for equal service and due process. Furthermore, supplying a public option would put competitive pressures on private providers.
[…]
We can also introduce structural limits on technologies with the goal of precluding dangerous concentrations of power. While much of the debate over big data and privacy has tended to emphasize the concerns of individuals, we might view a robust privacy regime as a kind of structural limit: if firms are precluded from collecting or using certain types of data, that limits the kinds of power they can exercise. Some of this is already happening, thankfully, through structural limitations such as GDPR. I hope this is the first step in a more coordinated response to internet giants who increasingly have more impact on the day-to-day lives of citizens than their governments.
Having just finished reading Utopia for Realists, I definitely think the left needs to think bigger than it’s currently doing, and really push that Overton window.
Source: Logic magazine (via Ian O’Byrne)
“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
(Stephen Covey)
Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, writes:
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that people no longer want to be paid for their work. But a paycheck alone is no longer enough to maintain engagement. As work becomes more difficult to specify and observe, managers have to ensure excellent performance via methods other than prescription, observation, and inspection. Micromanaging complex work is impossible. Whitehurst suggests that there are three things organisations can do. I’d support all of these:
Don’t get me wrong, forming a co-op doesn’t automatically guarantee worker satisfaction, but it’s a whole lot more motivating when you know you’re not just working to make someone else rich.
Source: opensource.com
Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, writes:
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that people no longer want to be paid for their work. But a paycheck alone is no longer enough to maintain engagement. As work becomes more difficult to specify and observe, managers have to ensure excellent performance via methods other than prescription, observation, and inspection. Micromanaging complex work is impossible. Whitehurst suggests that there are three things organisations can do. I’d support all of these:
Don’t get me wrong, forming a co-op doesn’t automatically guarantee worker satisfaction, but it’s a whole lot more motivating when you know you’re not just working to make someone else rich.
Source: opensource.com
“For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
I was at the Thinking Digital conference yesterday, which is always an inspiring event. It kicked off with a presentation from a representative of Amazon’s Alexa programme, who cited an article by Walt Mossberg from this time last year. I’m pretty sure I read about it, but didn’t necessarily write about it, at the time.
Mossberg talks about how computing will increasingly become invisible:
Source: The Verge
This is a long article with a philosophical take on one of my favourite subjects: social networks and the flow of information. The author, C Thi Nguyen, is an assistant professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University and distinguishes between two things that he things have been conflated:
[…]
An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited.
[…]
In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust. It feels like towards the end of my decade as an active user of Twitter there was a definite shift from it being an ‘epistemic bubble’ towards being an ‘echo chamber’. My ‘Personal Learning Network’ (or ‘PLN’) seemed to be a bit more militant in its beliefs.
Nguyen goes on to talk at length about fake news, sociological theories, and Cartesian epistemology. Where he ends up, however, is where I would: trust.
I see this in fanatical evangelism of blockchain solutions to the ‘problem’ of operating in a trustless environment. To my mind, we need to be trusting people more, not less. Of course, there are obvious exceptions, but breaches of trust are near the top of the list of things we should punish most in a society.
Source: Aeon (via Ian O’Byrne)
This is a long article with a philosophical take on one of my favourite subjects: social networks and the flow of information. The author, C Thi Nguyen, is an assistant professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University and distinguishes between two things that he things have been conflated:
[…]
An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited.
[…]
In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust. It feels like towards the end of my decade as an active user of Twitter there was a definite shift from it being an ‘epistemic bubble’ towards being an ‘echo chamber’. My ‘Personal Learning Network’ (or ‘PLN’) seemed to be a bit more militant in its beliefs.
Nguyen goes on to talk at length about fake news, sociological theories, and Cartesian epistemology. Where he ends up, however, is where I would: trust.
I see this in fanatical evangelism of blockchain solutions to the ‘problem’ of operating in a trustless environment. To my mind, we need to be trusting people more, not less. Of course, there are obvious exceptions, but breaches of trust are near the top of the list of things we should punish most in a society.
Source: Aeon (via Ian O’Byrne)
This post on Of Dollars and Data is a bit rambling, at least from my perspective, but I did like this paragraph:
Source: Of Dollars and Data
This post on Of Dollars and Data is a bit rambling, at least from my perspective, but I did like this paragraph:
Source: Of Dollars and Data
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“Idealistic as it may sound, altruism should be the driving force in business, not just competition and a desire for wealth.”
(Dalai Lama)
Whatever your thoughts about Amazon, it’s hard to disagree that they’ve changed the world. Their CEO, Jeff Bezos, has some thoughts about what’s usually termed ‘work-life balance’:
I like his metaphor of a circle, about it not being a trade-off or ‘balance’:
Whether that’s true for the staff on targets in Amazon warehouses is a different matter, of course. But for knowledge workers, I think it’s spot-on.
Source: Chicago Tribune
This article in The Washington Post is, inevitably, focused on American work culture. However, I think it’s more widely applicable, even if we are a bit more chilled out in Europe.
The same goes with our so-called ‘work-life’ balance. What we actually need for a flourishing, healthy society and democracy is more rest. As Alex Pang, author of the book Rest notes, leisure is usually framed these days as a way to get more work done. Instead, we should value it for its own sake.
Source: The Washington Post
Although claims about the ‘unprecedented’ times we live in can be overblown, I think it’s reasonable to state that we exist in an uncertain world.
This article by Kristin Wong in The Cut talks about the importance of being able to tolerate uncertainty, as this “improves our decisions, promotes empathy, and boosts creativity,” — according to Jamie Holmes, a Future Tense Fellow at New America and author of the book, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing.
We’re better or worse at tolerating uncertainty and ambiguity in different situations. It’s not like we have a single emotional gear.
Source: The Cut (via Stowe Boyd)
I’m just on my way out if the house to head for Scotland to climb some mountains with my wife.
But while she does (what I call) her ‘last minute faffing’ I read Dan Hon’s newsletter. I’ll just quite the relevant section without any attempt at comment or analysis.
He includes references in his newsletter, but you’ll just have to click through for those.
They’ve made some executive decisions like coming down hard on curation versus algorithmic selection of content (see James Bridle’s excellent earlier essay on YouTube, that something is wrong on the internet and recent coverage of YouTube Kids' content selection method still finding ways to recommend, shall we say, videos espousing extreme views). And Amazon have addressed one of the core reported issues of having an Alexa in the house (the rudeness) by designing in support for a “magic word” Easter Egg that will reward kids for saying “please”. But that seems rather tactical and dealing with a specific issue and not, well, foundational. I think that the foundational issue is something more like this: parenting is a very personal subject. As I have become a parent, I have discovered (and validated through experimental data) that parents have very specific views about how to do things! Many parents do not agree with each other! Parents who agree with each other on some things do not agree on other things! In families where there are two parents there is much scope for disagreement on both desired outcome and method!
All of which is to say is that the current design, architecture and strategy of Alexa for Kids indicates one sort of one-size-fits-all method and that there’s not much room for parental customization. This isn’t to say that Amazon are actively preventing it and might not add it down the line - it’s just that it doesn’t really exist right now. Honan’s got a great point that:
“[For example,] take the magic word we mentioned earlier. There is no universal norm when it comes to what’s polite or rude. Manners vary by family, culture, and even region. While “yes, sir” may be de rigueur in Alabama, for example, it might be viewed as an element of the patriarchy in parts of California.”
Some parents may have very specific views on how they want to teach their kids to be polite. This kind of thinking leads me down the path of: well, are we imagining a world where Alexa or something like it is a sort of universal basic babysitter, with default norms and those who can get, well, customization? Or what someone else might call: attentive, individualized parenting?
When Alexa for Kids came out, I did about 10 seconds' worth of thinking and, based on how Alexa gets used in our house (two parents, a five year old and a 19 month old) and how our preschooler is behaving, I was pretty convinced that I’m in no way ready or willing to leave him alone with an Alexa for Kids in his room. My family is, in what some might see as that tedious middle class way, pretty strict about the amount of screen time our kids get (unsupervised and supervised) and suffice it to say that there’s considerable difference of opinion between my wife and myself on what we’re both comfortable with and at what point what level of exposure or usage might be appropriate.
And here’s where I reinforce that point again: are you okay with leaving your kids with a default babysitter, or are you the kind of person who has opinions about how you want your babysitter to act with your kids? (Yes, I imagine people reading this and clutching their pearls at the mere thought of an Alexa “babysitting” a kid but need I remind you that books are a technological object too and the issue here is in the degree of interactivity and access). At least with a babysitter I can set some parameters and I’ve got an idea of how the babysitter might interact with the kids because, well, that’s part of the babysitter screening process. Source: Things That Have Caught My Attention s5e11
As many people will be aware, the Open University (OU) is going through a pretty turbulent time in its history. As befitting the nature of the institution, a lot of conversations about its future are happening in public spaces.
Martin Weller, a professor at the university, has been vocal. In this post, a response to a keynote from Tony Bates, he offers a way forward.
I’m interested in this, because the view of an institution is formed not only by the people inside it, but by the press and those who have an opinion and an audience. Weller accuses Bates of being woefully out of date. I think he’s correct to call him out on it, as I’ve witnessed recently a whole host of middle-aged white guys lazily referencing things in presentations they haven’t bothered to research very well.
If you are fighting an imaginary analogue beast, then this becomes difficult. For instance, Tony does rightly highlight how we don’t make enough use of social media to support students, but then ignores that there are pockets of very good practice, for example the OU PG Education account and the use of social media in the Cisco courses. Rolling these out across the university is not simple, but it is the type of project that we know how to realise. But by framing the problem as one of wholesale structural, cultural change starting from a zero base, it makes achieving practical, implementable projects difficult. You can’t do that small(ish) thing until we’ve done these twenty big things. We seem to be living at a time when those who were massive, uncritical boosters of technology in education (and society in general) are realising the errors of their ways. I actually wouldn’t count Weller as an uncritical booster, but I welcome the fact that he is self-deprecating enough to include himself in that crowd.
Source: Martin Weller
This isn’t the most well-written post I’ve read this year, but it does point to a shift that I’ve noticed — perhaps because I work remotely.
So Uber instead of Cars, Spotify instead of CD’s, Netflix instead of DVD’s: on-demand this, on-demand that. Why bother to own something you seldom use, that becomes out of date rapidly, or that you really cannot afford. Rent it when you need it. Some might think that these are things ‘Millennials’ do, but if that generation is defined as those born from 1980 onwards then some of those are almost 40 years old. It’s not a trend that’s going away.
When you’re used to paying monthly for software, streaming music and films instead of buying them, and renting accommodation (because you’re priced out of the housing market), then you start thinking differently about the world.
Key though is that this extends beyond spaces rented on-demand; regardless of tenure it will become important to be able to also rent or purchase on-demand all the services one might need to make the most of your space, or to enable the most productive use of that space. So for businesses who employ people who can do most of what they do from anywhere, the problem becomes co-ordination rather than office space. Former Mozilla colleague John O’Duinn makes this point in his upcoming book.
Well you have people who:
Source: Antony Slumbers
I’ve no doubt that blockchain technology is useful for super-boring scenarios and underpinning get-rich-quick schemes, but it has very little value to the scenarios in which I work. I’m trying to build trust, not work in an environment where technology serves as a workaround.
This post by Kai Stinchcombe about the blockchain bubble is a fantastic read. The author’s summary?
“The difference between profit and benefit is that operations producing profit can be carried out by another in my place: he would make the profit, unless he was acting on my behalf. But the fact remains that profitable activity can always be carried out by someone else. Hence the principle of competition. On the other hand, what is beneficial to me depends on gestures, acts, living moments which it would be impossible for me to delegate.” (Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking)
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This article in Aeon by Victor Petrov posits that, in the post-industrial age, we no longer see human beings as primarily manual workers, but as thinkers using digital screens to get stuff done. What does that do to our self-image?
“Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out, for the crush wasn’t from outside me but in my own assumptions.” (Marcus Aurelius)
This article in the New York Times by Perri Klass, M.D. focuses on studies that show a link between parents reading to their children and a reduction in problematic behaviour.
Source: The New York Times
Image CC BY Jason Lander
An an historian, I’ve often been fascinated about what life must have been like before the dawn of electricity. I have a love-hate relationship with artificial light. On the one hand, I use a lightbox to stave off Seasonal Affective Disorder. On the other hand, I’ve got (my optician tells me) not only pale blue irises but very thin corneas. That makes me photophobic and subject to the kind of glare on a regular basis I can only imagine ‘normal’ people get after staring at a lightbulb for a while.
In this article, Linda Geddes describes an experiment in which she decided to forgo artificial life for a number of weeks to see what effect it had on her health and, most importantly, her sleep.
I’ve always been a big fan of memes. In fact, I discuss them in my thesis, ebook, and TEDx talk. This long-ish article from Jay Owens digs into their relationship with fake news and what he calls ‘post-authenticity’. What I’m really interested in, though, comes towards the end. He gets into the power of memes and why they’re the perfect form of online cultural expression.
Her response, inevitably was: 😂
It’s funny because it’s true. But it also quickly communicates solidarity and empathy.
Owens goes on to talk about how that memetic culture means that we’re living in a ‘post authentic’ world. But did such authenticity ever really exist?
Nonetheless, author Robin Sloan described the genius of the “American Chopper” meme as being that “THIS IS THE ONLY MEME FORMAT THAT ACKNOWLEDGES THE EXISTENCE OF COMPETING INFORMATION, AND AS SUCH IT IS THE ONLY FORMAT SUITED TO THE COMPLEXITY OF OUR WORLD!” Amen to that.
Source: Jay Owens
I’ve never been a fan of the résumé, or ‘Curriculum Vitae’ (CV) as we tend to call them in the UK. How on earth can a couple of sheets of paper ever hope to sum up an individual in all of their complexity? It inevitably leads to the kind of things that end up on LinkedIn profiles: your academic qualifications, job history, and a list of hobbies that don’t make you sound like a loser.
In this (long-ish) article for Quartz, Oliver Staley looks at what Laszlo Bock is up to with his new startup, with a detour through the history of the résumé.
I really dislike résumés, and I’m delighted that I’ve managed to get my last couple of jobs without having to rely on them. I guess that’s a huge benefit of working openly; the web is your résumé.
Unfortunately, Henry Ford’s ‘faster horses’ rule also applies to résumés. And (cue eye roll) people need to find a way to work in buzzwords like ‘blockchain’.
I’m more interested in different approaches, rather than doubling-down on the existing approach, so it’s good to see large multinational companies like Unilever doing away with résumés. They prefer game-like assessments.
It all sounds great but, at the end of the day it’s extra unpaid work, and more jumping through hoops.
Back to Laszlo Bock, who claims that we should have an algorithmic system that matches people to available positions. I’m guessing he hasn’t read Brave New World.
For-profit entities wouldn’t be trusted as stewards of such sensitive information. Nor would governments, Bock says, noting that in communist Romania, where he was born, “the government literally had dossiers on every single citizen.”
Ultimately, Bock says, the system should be maintained by a not-for-profit, non-governmental organization. “What I’m imagining, no human being should ever look inside this thing. You shouldn’t need to,” he says.
Source: Quartz at Work
This is an interesting post to read, not least because I sat next to the author at the conference he describes last week, and we had a discussion about related issues. Michael Shaw, who’s a great guy and I’ve known for a few years, is in charge of Tes Resources.
Shaw is keen to point out that the Tes Resources site that he manages is “a potential space for OER-sharing”. He goes on to talk about how he’s an ‘OER pragmatist’ rather than an ‘OER purist’. As a former journalist, Shaw is a great writer. However, I want to tease apart some things I think he conflates.
In his March 2018 post announcing the next phase of development for Tes Resources, Shaw announced that the goal was to create “a community of authors providing high-quality resources for educators”. He conflates that in this post with educators sharing Open Educational Resources. I don’t think the two things are the same, and that’s not because I’m an ‘OER purist’.
The concern that I, and others in the Open Education community, have around commercial players in ecosystem is the tendency to embrace, extend, and extinguish:
Tes Resources, Shaw admitted to me, doesn’t even have an API. It’s a bit like Medium, the place he chose to publish this post. If he’d written the post in something like WordPress, he’d be notified of my reply via web standard technologies. Medium doesn’t adhere to those standards. Nor does Tes Resources. It’s a walled garden.
My call, then, would be for Tes Resources to develop an API so that services such as the MoodleNet project I’m leading, can query and access it. Up until then, it’s not a repository. It’s just another silo.
Source: Michael Shaw
Image: CC BY Jess
Despite — or perhaps because of — my feelings towards the British monarchy, this absolutely made my day:
Isn’t the internet great?
Source: Haha
Not a huge sample size, but this article has studied what makes ‘super-productive’ people tick:
Source: Harvard Business Review (via Ian O’Byrne)
“We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors — walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
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Should you design for addiction or for loyalty? That’s the question posed by Michelle Manafy in this post for Nieman Lab. It all depends, she says, on whether you’re trying to attract users or an audience.
However, the reader experience that shallow clicks deliver doesn’t develop brand affinity or customer loyalty. And the negative consumer experience has actually been shown to extend to any advertising placed in its context. Sure, there are still those seeking a quick buck — but these days, we all see clickbait for what it is. Audiences mature over time and become wary of particular approaches. Remember “…and you’ll not believe what came next” approaches?
Ask Manafy notes, it’s much easier to design for addiction than to build an audience. The former just requires lots and lots of tracking — something at which the web has become spectacularly good at, due to advertising.
Designing for sustainability isn’t just good from a regulatory point of view, it’s good for long-term business, argues Manafy:
Source: Nieman Lab
While the prospects of me learning the Russian language anytime soon are effectively zero, I do have a soft spot for the country. My favourite novels are 19th century Russian fiction, the historical time period I’m most fond of is the Russian revolutions of 1917*, and I really like some of the designs that came out of Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia. (That doesn’t mean I condone the atrocities, of course.)
The Soviet era, from 1950 onwards, isn’t really a time period I’ve studied in much depth. I taught it as a History teacher as part of a module on the Cold War, but that was very much focused on the American and British side of things. So I’ve missed out on some of the wonderful design that came out of that time period. Here’s a couple of my favourites featured in this article. I may have to buy the book it mentions!
Source: Atlas Obscura
In references for jobs, former employers are required to be positive. Therefore, a reference that focuses on how polite and punctual someone is could actually be a damning indictment of their ability. Such ‘conversational implicature’ is the focus of this article:
I’ve noted that the more technically-minded a person, the less they use conversational implicature. In addition, and I’m not sure if this is true or just my own experience, I’ve found that Americans tend to be more literal in their communication than Europeans.
Source: Aeon
Articles like this are usually clickbait with two or three useful bits of advice that you’ve already read elsewhere, coupled with some other random things to pad it out. That’s not the case with Ryan Holiday’s post, which lists:
Source: Thought Catalog
When I rocked up to the MoodleMoot in Miami back in November last year, I ran a workshop that involved human spectrograms, post-it notes, and participatory activities. Although I work in tech and my current role is effectively a product manager for Moodle, I still see myself primarily as an educator.
This, however, was a surprise for some people who didn’t know me very well before I joined Moodle. As one person put it, “I didn’t know you had that in your toolbox”. The same was true at Mozilla; some people there just saw me as a quasi-academic working on web literacy stuff.
Given this, I was particularly interested in a post from Steve Blank which outlined why he enjoys working with startup-like organisations rather than large, established companies:
The paper that Blank cites covers research which followed 12,686 people over 30+ years. It comes up with seven main findings, but the most interesting thing for me (given my work on badges) is the following:
This implication, that entrepreneurs are, in fact, “cherries” contrasts with a large body of literature in social science, which says that the entrepreneurs are the “lemons”— those who cannot find, cannot hold, or cannot stand “real jobs.” My main takeaway from this isn’t necessarily that entrepreneurship is always the best option, but that we’re really bad at signalling abilities and finding the right people to work with. I’m convinced that using digital credentials can improve that, but only if we use them in transformational ways, rather than replicate the status quo.
Source: Steve Blank
The ever-relevant and compulsively-readable Ben Williamson turns his attention to ‘precision education’ in his latest post. It would seem that now that the phrase ‘personalised learning’ has jumped the proverbial shark, people are doubling down on the rather dangerous assumption that we just need more data to provide better learning experiences.
[…]
A particularly important aspect of precision education as it is being advocated by others, however, is its scientific basis. Whereas most personalized learning platforms tend to focus on analysing student progress and outcomes, precision education requires much more intimate data to be collected from students. Precision education represents a shift from the collection of assessment-type data about educational outcomes, to the generation of data about the intimate interior details of students’ genetic make-up, their psychological characteristics, and their neural functioning. As Williamson points out, the collection of ‘intimate data’ is particularly concerning, particularly in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations.
Source: Code Acts in Education
This short posts cites a talk entitled 10 Timeframes given by Paul Ford back in 2012:
When we’re designing things for other people, or indeed working with our colleagues, we need to think not only about our own productivity but how that will impact others. I find it sad when people don’t do the extra work to make it easier for the person they have the power to impact. That could be as simple as sending an email that, you know, includes the link to the think being referenced. Or it could be an entire operating system, a building, or a new project management procedure.
In my own life and practice, I go out of my way to make life easier for other people. Ultimately, of course, it makes life easier for me. By modelling behaviours that other people can copy, you’re more likely to be the recipient of time-saving practices and courteous behaviour. I’ve still a lot to learn, but it’s nice to be nice.
Source: James Shelley (via Adam Procter)
This short posts cites a talk entitled 10 Timeframes given by Paul Ford back in 2012:
When we’re designing things for other people, or indeed working with our colleagues, we need to think not only about our own productivity but how that will impact others. I find it sad when people don’t do the extra work to make it easier for the person they have the power to impact. That could be as simple as sending an email that, you know, includes the link to the think being referenced. Or it could be an entire operating system, a building, or a new project management procedure.
In my own life and practice, I go out of my way to make life easier for other people. Ultimately, of course, it makes life easier for me. By modelling behaviours that other people can copy, you’re more likely to be the recipient of time-saving practices and courteous behaviour. I’ve still a lot to learn, but it’s nice to be nice.
Source: James Shelley (via Adam Procter)
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I came across this, I think, via one of the aggregation sites I skim. It’s a letter in the form of an article by Paul J. Griffiths, who is a Professor of Catholic Theology at Duke Divinity School. In it, he replies to a student who has asked how to become an intellectual.
Griffiths breaks it down into four requirements, and then at the end gives a warning.
[…]
The most essential skill is surprisingly hard to come by. That skill is attention. Intellectuals always think about something, and that means they need to know how to attend to what they’re thinking about. Attention can be thought of as a long, slow, surprised gaze at whatever it is.
[…]
The long, slow, surprised gaze requires cultivation. We’re quickly and easily habituated, with the result that once we’ve seen something a few times it comes to seem unsurprising, and if it’s neither threatening nor useful it rapidly becomes invisible. There are many reasons for this (the necessities of survival; the fact of the Fall), but whatever a full account of those might be (“full account” being itself a matter for thinking about), their result is that we can’t easily attend. This section was difficult to quote as it weaves in specific details from the original student’s letter, but the gist is that people assume that universities are good places for intellectual pursuits. Griffiths responds that this may or may not be the case, and, in fact, is less likely to be true as the 21st century progresses.
Instead, we need to cultivate attention, which he describes as being almost like a muscle. Griffiths suggests “intentionally engaging in repetitive activity” such as “practicing a musical instrument, attending Mass daily, meditating on the rhythms of your breath, taking the same walk every day (Kant in Königsberg)” to “foster attentiveness”.
As a society, we worship at the altar of the lone genius but, in fact, that idea is fundamentally flawed. Progress and breakthroughs come through discussion and collaboration, not sitting in a darkened room by yourself with a wet tea-towel over your head, thinking very hard.
Interestingly, and importantly, Griffiths points out to the student to whom he’s replying that the life of an intellectual might seem attractive, but that it’s a long, hard road.
Source: First Things
I like Craig Mod’s writing. He’s the guy that’s written on his need to walk, drawing his own calendar, and getting his attention back.
This article is hardware Kindle devices — the distinction being important given that you can read your books via the Kindle Cloud Reader or, indeed, via an app on pretty much any platform.
As he points out, the user interface remains sub-optimal:
The problem is that the text is also an interface element. But it’s a lower-level element. Activated through a longer tap. In essence, the Kindle hardware and software team has decided to “function stack” multiple layers of interface onto the same plane.
And so this model has never felt right. He suggests an alternative to this which involves physical buttons on the device itself:
I read in lots of places, but I read in bed with my wife every day and if there’s one thing she couldn’t stand, it was the clicking noise of me turning the page on my Kindle. Even if I tried to press it quietly, it annoyed her. Touchscreen page turns are much better.
The e-reader I use has a similar touch interaction to the Kindle, so I see where Craig Mod is coming from when he says:
Source: Craig Mod
While I don’t feel like I’ve got any enemies, I’m sure there’s plenty of people who don’t like me, for whatever reason. I’ve never thought about framing it this way, though:
“Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will appear superficial. Death is the only thing we can know with any certainty. And as such, it must be the compass by which we orient all our other values and decisions. It is the correct answer to all of the questions we should ask but never do. The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. This is the basic root of all happiness.”
(Mark Manson)
Today’s a non-work day for me but, after reviewing resource-centric social media sites as part of my Moodle work yesterday, I rediscovered the joy of StumbleUpon.
That took me to lots of interesting sites which, if you haven’t used the service before, become more relevant to your tastes as time goes on if you use the thumbs up / thumbs down tool.
I came across this Random Street View site which I’ve a sneaking suspicion I’ve seen before. Not only is it a fascinating way to ‘visit’ lesser-known parts of the world, it also shows the scale of Google’s Street View programme.
The teacher in me imagines using this as the starting point for some kind of project. It could be a writing prompt, you could use it to randomly find somewhere to do some research on, or it could even be an art project.
Great stuff.
Source: Random Street View
“To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There’s a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.”
(Mark Manson)
This post by Daniel Gross, partner in a well-known startup accelerator is written for an audience of people in tech looking to build their next company. However, I think there’s more widely-applicable takeaways from it.
Gross mentions the following:
Take someone who’s looking for the next thing to do. Perhaps they’re dissatisfied with their current line of work, and so want to pursue opportunities in a different sector. It’s useful for them to look at what’s ‘normal’ (for example, teachers and lawyers work long hours). Once you’ve done your due diligence, it’s worth just getting started. Go and do something to set yourself on the road.
Source: Daniel Gross
Someone described the act of watching Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before Congress as “low level self-harm”. In this post, Joe Edelman explains why:
Referencing his HSC1 Curriculum which is the basis for workshops he runs for staff from major tech companies, Edelman includes a graphic on the structural features of privacy. I’ll type this out here for the sake of legibility:
Nevertheless, and even without attending his sessions (which I’m sure are great) there’s value in thinking through each of these elements for the work I’m doing around the MoodleNet project. I’ve probably done some thinking around 70% of these, but it’s great to have a list that helps me organise my thinking a little more.
Source: Joe Edelman
Right now, I’m splitting my time between being employed (four days per week with Moodle), my consultancy and the co-op which I co-founded (one day per week combined). In other words, I have more than one income stream, as this article suggests:
Source: Inc.
Right now, I’m splitting my time between being employed (four days per week with Moodle), my consultancy and the co-op which I co-founded (one day per week combined). In other words, I have more than one income stream, as this article suggests:
Source: Inc.
This richly-illustrated post uses as a touchstone the revolution in art that took place in the 17th century with Johannes Vermeer’s The Little Street. The painting (which can be seen above) moves away from epic and religious symbolism, and towards the everyday.
Unfortunately, and particularly with celebrity lifestyles on display everywhere, we seem to be moving back to pre-17th century approaches:
Source: The Book of Life
This richly-illustrated post uses as a touchstone the revolution in art that took place in the 17th century with Johannes Vermeer’s The Little Street. The painting (which can be seen above) moves away from epic and religious symbolism, and towards the everyday.
Unfortunately, and particularly with celebrity lifestyles on display everywhere, we seem to be moving back to pre-17th century approaches:
Source: The Book of Life
The latest issue of the newsletter hit inboxes earlier today!
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“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour — your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”(Karl Marx)
Benedict Evans is a venture capitalist who focuses on technology companies. He’s a smart guy with some important insights, and I thought his recent post about the ‘death of the newsfeed’ on social networks was particularly useful.
He points out that it’s pretty inevitable that the average person will, over the course of a few years, add a few hundred ‘friends’ to their connections on any given social network. Let’s say you’re connected with 300 people, and they all share five things each day. That’s 1,500 things you’ll be bombarded with, unless the social network does something about it.
The problem with that, though?
Source: Benedict Evans
Leadership is a funny thing. There’s lots written about it, but, at the end of the day, it’s all about relationships.
I’ve worked for some great leaders, and some shitty managers. This Harvard Business Review article describes the usual three ways those in positions of power get things wrong:
Source: Harvard Business Review
It’s good to see Cal Newport, whose book Deep Work I found unexpectedly great last year, add a bit more nuance to his position on social media:
The older progressives, however, remember the internet before the platform monopolies. They were concerned to observe a small number of companies attempt to consolidate much of the internet into their for-profit, walled gardens.
To them, social media is not the internet. It was instead a force that was co-opting the internet — including the powerful capabilities listed above — in ways that would almost certainly lead to trouble. Newport has started talking about the difference between ‘social media’ and the ‘social internet’:
Social media, by contrast, describes the attempt to privatize these capabilities by large companies within the newly emerged algorithmic attention economy, a particularly virulent strain of the attention sector that leverages personal data and sophisticated algorithms to ruthlessly siphon users’ cognitive capital. If you’d asked people in 2005, they would have said that there was no way that people would leave MySpace in favour of a different platform.
Following up with another this post this week, Newport writes:
What I don’t see being discussed is that as we collectively mature in our use of social media is that we’re likely to use different networks for different purposes. Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like try to force us into a single online identity. It’s OK to look and act differently when you’re around different people in different environments.
Source: Cal Newport (On Social Media and Its Discontents / Beyond #DeleteFacebook: More Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media)
It’s good to see Cal Newport, whose book Deep Work I found unexpectedly great last year, add a bit more nuance to his position on social media:
The older progressives, however, remember the internet before the platform monopolies. They were concerned to observe a small number of companies attempt to consolidate much of the internet into their for-profit, walled gardens.
To them, social media is not the internet. It was instead a force that was co-opting the internet — including the powerful capabilities listed above — in ways that would almost certainly lead to trouble. Newport has started talking about the difference between ‘social media’ and the ‘social internet’:
Social media, by contrast, describes the attempt to privatize these capabilities by large companies within the newly emerged algorithmic attention economy, a particularly virulent strain of the attention sector that leverages personal data and sophisticated algorithms to ruthlessly siphon users’ cognitive capital. If you’d asked people in 2005, they would have said that there was no way that people would leave MySpace in favour of a different platform.
Following up with another this post this week, Newport writes:
What I don’t see being discussed is that as we collectively mature in our use of social media is that we’re likely to use different networks for different purposes. Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like try to force us into a single online identity. It’s OK to look and act differently when you’re around different people in different environments.
Source: Cal Newport (On Social Media and Its Discontents / Beyond #DeleteFacebook: More Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media)
I subscribe to the free version of Stowe Boyd’s Work Futures newsletter. He’s jumped around platforms a bit when I think he’d be better off charging a smaller amount for a larger audience on Patreon.
Boyd’s latest post talks about how he approaches his work, a subject I find endlessly fascinating.
Source: Work Futures
I subscribe to the free version of Stowe Boyd’s Work Futures newsletter. He’s jumped around platforms a bit when I think he’d be better off charging a smaller amount for a larger audience on Patreon.
Boyd’s latest post talks about how he approaches his work, a subject I find endlessly fascinating.
Source: Work Futures
I still don’t really see the need for blockchain-based credentials (particularly given the tension between GDPR and immutability) but this is good to see:
Source: Learning Machine blog
I still don’t really see the need for blockchain-based credentials (particularly given the tension between GDPR and immutability) but this is good to see:
Source: Learning Machine blog
Given the choice of living in a so-called ‘smart city’ and living in rural isolation, I think I’d prefer the latter. This opinion has been strengthened by reading about what’s going on in China at the moment:
Nearly 14,000 people were identified by the system in its first ten months of its operation. Now, Intellifusion, who created the system, is planning to send warnings by WeChat and Sina Weibo messages; repeat offenders will get their social credit scores docked. Yes, that’s right: social credit. Much more insidious than a fine, having a low social credit rating means that you can’t travel.
Certainly something to think about when you hear people talking about ‘smart cities of the future’.
Source: BoingBoing
(related: 99% Invisible podcast on the invention of ‘jaywalking’)
Given the choice of living in a so-called ‘smart city’ and living in rural isolation, I think I’d prefer the latter. This opinion has been strengthened by reading about what’s going on in China at the moment:
Nearly 14,000 people were identified by the system in its first ten months of its operation. Now, Intellifusion, who created the system, is planning to send warnings by WeChat and Sina Weibo messages; repeat offenders will get their social credit scores docked. Yes, that’s right: social credit. Much more insidious than a fine, having a low social credit rating means that you can’t travel.
Certainly something to think about when you hear people talking about ‘smart cities of the future’.
Source: BoingBoing
(related: 99% Invisible podcast on the invention of ‘jaywalking’)
These days, we tend to think of artists as working on their art full-time. After all, it’s their passion and vocation. That’s not always the case, as this article points out:
I’m not sure what to say about this announcement from Mozilla about their ‘new’ Web Literacy Curriculum. I led this work from 2012 to 2015 at the Mozilla Foundation, but it doesn’t seem to be any further forward now than when I left.
In fact, it seems to have just been re-focused for the libraries sector:
Four years ago, I wrote a post on the Mozilla Learning blog about Atul Varma’s WebLitMapper, Laura Hilliger’s Web Literacy Learning Pathways, as well as the draft alignment guidelines I’d drawn up. Where has the innovation gone since that point?
It’s sad to see such a small, undeveloped resource from an organisation that once showed such potential in teaching the world the Web.
Source: Read, Write, Participate
I’m not sure what to say about this announcement from Mozilla about their ‘new’ Web Literacy Curriculum. I led this work from 2012 to 2015 at the Mozilla Foundation, but it doesn’t seem to be any further forward now than when I left.
In fact, it seems to have just been re-focused for the libraries sector:
Four years ago, I wrote a post on the Mozilla Learning blog about Atul Varma’s WebLitMapper, Laura Hilliger’s Web Literacy Learning Pathways, as well as the draft alignment guidelines I’d drawn up. Where has the innovation gone since that point?
It’s sad to see such a small, undeveloped resource from an organisation that once showed such potential in teaching the world the Web.
Source: Read, Write, Participate
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I’ve long admired the “invincible summer” quotation from Camus. The longer version, however is much better.
After I couldn’t find anywhere to buy a version that met my requirements (simple aesthetic longer quotation) I decided to order a custom wall decal.
This evening, I put it up on the wall above the monitor on my standing desk. If you’re wondering where the author attribution is, well… I didn’t get that bit quite right, so it’s in the bin!
One of my favourite parts of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is this one:
This article from Lifehacker is along the same lines:
Final thought? It’s worth being nice to people as you never know when they’re going to be in a position to do you a favour. It doesn’t, however, mean you have to hang out with them all of the time.
Source: Lifehacker
It makes sense for companies reliant on advertising to not only get as much data as they can about you, but to make sure that you have a single identity on their platform to which to associate it.
This article by Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing reports on some research around young people and social media. As Doctorow states:
Those younger than me are well aware of the perils and pitfalls of a single online identity:
Binns writes:
My research shows young people dislike the way Facebook ties them into a fixed self. Facebook insists on real names and links different areas of a person’s life, carrying over from school to university to work. This arguably restricts the freedom to explore new identities – one of the key benefits of the web.
The desire for escapable transience over damning permanence has driven Snapchat’s success, precisely because it’s a messaging app that allows users to capture videos and pictures that are quickly removed from the service. This is important for the work I’m leading around Project MoodleNet. It’s not just teenagers who want “escapable transience over damning permanence”.
Source: BoingBoing
Some companies have (and advertise as a huge perk) their ‘unlimited vacation’ policy. That, of course, sounds amazing. Except, of course, that there’s a reason why companies are so benevolent.
I can think of at least two:
What we need to be focusing on in education is preparing young people to be compassionate human beings, not cogs in the capitalist machine.
Source: The Guardian
I’ve just installed Lumen Privacy Monitor on my Android smartphone after reading this blog post from Mozilla:
Source: Mozilla: Read, Write, Participate
The Guardian has a list of 18 tips to ‘survive’ (i.e. be safe) in an age where everyone wants to know everything about you — so that they can package up your data and sell it to the highest bidder.
Here’s the Guardian’s list:
Source: The Guardian
A great short post from Seth Godin, who explains how things work in the real world when you’re looking for a job or your next gig:
Source: Seth Godin
Over on a microcast at Patreon (subscribers only, I’m afraid) I referenced an email conversation I’ve been having about getting people off Facebook.
WIRED has a handy list of apps that replicate the functionality of the platform. It’s important to bear in mind that no other platform has the same feature set as Facebook. Of course it doesn’t, because no other platform has the dollars and support of the military-industrial complex quite like Facebook.
Nevertheless, here’s what WIRED suggests:
I’ve used, and like, all of the apps on that list, with the exception of Paperless Post, which looks like it’s iOS-only.
OK, so it’s not easy getting people off a site that provides so much functionality, but it’s certainly possible. Lead by example, people.
Source: WIRED
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Dave Pell writes NextDraft, a daily newsletter that’s one of the most popular on the web. I used to subscribe, and it’s undeniably brilliant, but a little US-centric for my liking.
My newsletter, Thought Shrapnel, doesn’t track you. In fact, I have to keep battling MailChimp (the platform I use to send it out) as it thinks I’ve made a mistake. Tracking is so pervasive but I have no need to know exactly how many people clicked on a particular link. It’s an inexact science, anyway.
Pell has written a great post about online privacy:
“Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” (Alexander Graham Bell)
For almost a year, I’ve been building up supporters for Thought Shrapnel through a semi-automated workflow that involved Gumroad. I still think that’s an excellent platform but, this week, I emailed the ~50 current supporters of Thought Shrapnel to let them know I’ll be transitioning to a Patreon page I’ve set up.
As part of the transition, I’ll be moving Microcasts over to Patreon too. That’s for three reasons:
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I saw (via OLDaily) that OERu is now using Mastodon to form a social network. This might work, it might not, but I’m flagging it as it’s the approach that I’ve moved away from for creating Project MoodleNet.
We encourage OERu learners to use this social network as part of your personal learning environment (PLE) to interact with your personal learning network (PLN). Many of our courses incorporate activities using Mastodon and this technology is a great way to stay connected with your learning community. The OERu hosted version is located at mastodon.oeru.org. I was initially convinced that this was the right approach to building what Martin Dougiamas has described as “a new open social media platform for educators, focused on professional development and open content”. I got deeply involved in the ActivityPub protocol and geeked-out on how ‘decentralised’ it all would be.
However, I’ve changed my mind. Instead of dropping people into another social network (on top of their accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) we’re going to build it around something which will be immediately useful: resource curation. More soon, and follow the Project MoodleNet blog for updates!
Oh, and if you need a short, visual Mastodon explainer, check out this new video.
Source: OERu
That products should be ‘user-focused’ goes without queustion these days. At least by everyone apart from Cassie Robinson, who writes:
Source: Cassie Robinson
The popular view of life seems to be that mishaps, hardship, and struggle are all things that most people can avoid. If we stop to think about that for a second, that’s obviously untrue; in fact, the opposite is the case.
This article in Lifehacker quotes Seneca, one of my favourite Stoic philosophers:
Source: Lifehacker
I don’t think the right term for this is ‘mobile blindness’ but Seth Godin’s analogy is nevertheless instructive.
He talks about the shift over the last 20 years or so in getting our news and information on primarily via books and newspapers, to getting it via desktop computers, and now predominantly through our mobile devices. Things become bite-sized, and our attention field is wide by shallow.
You can safely ignore what doesn’t align with your goals in life. First, of course, you have to have some goals…
Source: Seth Godin
I have huge respect for Derek Sivers, and really enjoyed his book Anything You Want. His book reviews are also worth trawling through.
In this post, which made its way to the Hacker News front page, Sivers talks about his relationship with Facebook, and why he’s finally decided to quit the platform:
But today I had a new thought:
Maybe the fact that I use it to share my blog posts is a tiny tiny reason why others are still using it. It’s like I’m still visiting friends in the smoking area, even though I don’t smoke. Maybe if I quit going entirely, it will help my friends quit, too. Last year, I wrote a post entitled Friends don’t let friends use Facebook. The problem is, it’s difficult. Despite efforts to suggest alternatives, most of the clubs our children are part of (for activities such as swimming and karate) use Facebook. I don’t have an account, but my wife has to if we’re to keep up-to-date. It’s a vicious circle.
Like Sivers, I’ve considered just being on Facebook to promote my blog posts. But I don’t want to be part of the problem:
Ultimately, as Sivers notes, Facebook will go away because of the adoption lifecycle of platforms and products. It’s difficult to think of that, but I’ll leave the last word to the late, great Ursula Le Guin:
“To know things well, we must know the details, and as they are almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.”
(François de La Rochefoucauld)
When you go deep enough into philosophy or religion one of the key insights is that everything is temporary. Success is temporary. Suffering is temporary. Your time on earth is temporary.
One way of thinking about this one a day-to-day basis is that everything is a bridge to something else. So that technology that I’ve been excited about since 2011? Yep, it’s a bridge (or perhaps a raft) to get to something else.
Benedict Evans, who works for the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, sends out a great, short newsletter every week to around 95,000 people. I’m one of them. In this week’s missive, he linked to a blog post he wrote about bridging technologies.
In the world of open source, however, it’s a slightly different process. Instead of thinking about the ‘runway’ of capital that you’ve got before you have to give up and go home, it’s about deciding when it no longer makes sense to maintain the project you’re working on. In some cases, the answer to that is ‘never’ which means that the project keeps going and going and going.
It can be good to have a forcing function to focus people’s minds. I’m thinking, for example, of Steve Jobs declaring war on Flash. The reasons he gives are disingenuous (accusing Adobe of not being ‘open’!) but the upshot of Apple declaring Flash as dead to them caused the entire industry to turn upside down. In effect, Flash was a ‘bridge’ to the full web on mobile devices.
Using the idea of technology ‘bridges’ in my own work can lead to some interesting conclusions. For example, the Project MoodleNet work that I’m beginning will ultimately be a bridge to something else for Moodle. Thinking about my own career, each step has been a bridge to something else; the most interesting bridges have been those where I haven’t been quite sure what was one the other side. Or, indeed, if there even was an other side…
Source: Benedict Evans
I’m so used to working openly by default that I sometimes forget that for many (most?) people it’s a new, and sometimes quite scary, step.
Alfonso Sánchez Uzábal pointed to choosealicense.com from GitHub, which makes it simple to choose an open license for your software project. Moodle, for example, is GPL but it gives other examples such as MIT and Apache.
For everything other than software, you’re probably best off with Creative Commons licenses. I’ve been using these for the last fifteen years now on my work and highly recommend them.
“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.” (Frank Herbert)
Our 11 year-old still asks plenty of questions, but also looks things up for himself online. Our seven year-old fires off barrages of questions when she wakes up, to and from school, during dinner, before bed — basically anytime she can get a word in edgeways.
I have sympathy, therefore, for Emma Marris, who decided to show those who aren’t parents of young children (or perhaps those who have forgotten) what it’s like.
I’m not saying we’re amazing parents, but one thing we try and do is to not just tell our children the answer to their questions, but tell them how we worked it out. That’s particularly important if we used some kind of device to help us find the answer. Recently, I’ve been using the Google Assistant which feels to an adult almost interface-free. However, there’s a definite knack to it that you forget once you’re used to using it.
Over and above that, a lot of questions that children ask are permission and equality-related. In other words, they’re asking if they’re allowed to do something, or if you’ll intervene because the other child is doing something they shouldn’t / gaining an advantage. Both my wife and I have been teachers, and the same is true in the classroom.
There’s a couple of things I’ve learned here:
Mike Murphy has been travelling to tech conferences: CES, MWC, and SXSW. He hasn’t been overly-impressed by what he’s seen:
However, that shouldn’t necessarily be cause for concern: There is still much to be excited about in technology. You just won’t find much of it at the biggest conferences of the year, which are basically spring breaks for nerds. But there is value in bringing so many similarly interested people together.
[…]
Just don’t expect the world of tomorrow to look like the marketing stunts of today. I see these events as a way to catch up the mainstream with what’s been happening in pockets of innovation over the past year or so. Unfortunately, this is increasingly being covered in a layer of marketing spin and hype so that it’s difficult to separate the useful from the trite.
Source: Quartz
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I play ‘video games’ (a curiously old-fashioned term) with my kids all the time. Current favourites are FIFA 18 and Star Wars Battlefront II. We also enjoy Party Golf as a whole family (hilarious!)
My children play different games with each other than they play with me. They’re more likely to play Lego Worlds or Minecraft (the latter always on their tablets). And when I’m away we play word games such as Words With Friends 2 or Wordbase.
The author of this article, David Cole, points out that playing games with his son is a different experience than he was expecting it to be:
Last week, the New York Times issued a correction to an article written by Justin Bank about President Trump. This was no ordinary correction, however:
The person responsible has written an excellent follow-up article about the joys of browser extensions:
Source: The New York Times
The slow movement began with ‘slow food’ which was in opposition to, unsurprisingly, ‘fast food’. Since then there’s been, with greater and lesser success, ‘slow’ versions of many things: education, cinema, religion… you name it.
In this article, the author suggests ‘slow thought’. Unfortunately, the connotation around ‘slow thinking’ is already negative so I don’t think the manifesto they provide will catch on. They also quote French philosophers…
Source: Aeon
“When a young man was boasting in the theatre and saying, I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men; Epictetus said, I also have conversed with many rich men, but am not rich.”
(from ‘Fragments of Epictetus’)
The Book of Life from the School of Life is an ever-expanding treasure trove of wisdom. In this entry, entitled Knowing Things Intellectually vs. Knowing Them Emotionally the focus is on different ways of how we ‘know’ things:
[…]
Therapy builds on the idea of a return to live feelings. It’s only when we’re properly in touch with feelings that we can correct them with the help of our more mature faculties – and thereby address the real troubles of our adult lives. The article has threaded through it the example of having an abusive relationship as a child. Thankfully, I didn’t experience that, but it does make a great suggestion that finding the source of one’s anxiety and fully experiencing the emotion at its core might be helpful.
I remember the early days of Twitter. It was great, as there were many different clients, both native apps and web-based ones. There was lots of innovation in the ecosystem and, in fact, the ‘pull-to-refresh’ feature that’s now baked into every social app on a touchscreen device was first created for a third-party Twitter client.
Twitter then, of course, once it had reached critical mass and mainstream adoption, killed off that third party ecosystem to ‘own the experience’. It looks like Slack, the messaging app for teams, is doing something similar by turning off support for IRC and XMPP gateways:
Slack’s business model is to record everything said in a workspace and then to sell you access to their record of your conversations.
They’re a typical walled garden, information silo or Siren Server
So they have to close everything off, to make sure that people can’t extract their conversations out of the silo.
We saw it with Google, who built Gtalk on XMPP and even federated with other XMPP servers, only to later stop federation and XMPP support in favour of trying to herd the digital cattle into the Google+ enclosure.
Facebook, who also built their chat app on XMPP at first allowed 3rd party XMPP clients to connect and then later dropped interoperability.
Twitter, although not using or supporting XMPP, had a vibrant 3rd party client ecosystem which they killed off once they felt big enough.
Slack, like so many others before them, pretend to care about interoperability, opening up just so slightly, so that they can lure in people with the promise of “openness”, before eventually closing the gate once they’ve achieved sufficient size and lock-in. I’m definitely on the side of open source people/projects here, but it’s worth noting that the author uses the post to promote the solution he’s been developing. And why not?
There’s a comment below the post which makes, I think, a good point:
So I don’t think it’s as malicious as the author implies (Bait and Switch) as that requires some nefarious planning and foresight. I think it’s more likely to be business/product evolution, which still sucks for adopters and the free net, but not as maleficent. Just, unfortunately, the nature of early tech businesses maturing into Just Another Business. Indeed.
Source: Opkode
I stumbled across this conference presentation from back in January by Jeffrey Monro, “a doctoral student in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where [he studies] the textual and material histories of media technologies”.
It’s a short, but very interesting one, taking a step back from the current state of play to ask what we’re actually doing as a society.
So Monro is thinking about these security guides as a kind of ‘literary genre’:
We live in a digital world where everyone’s seemingly agitated and angry, all of the time:
Source: Jeffrey Moro
As I’ve mentioned before on Thought Shrapnel, next to my bed I have a memento mori, an object that reminds me that one day I will die.
My friend Ian O’Byrne had some sad news last week: his grandmother died. However, in an absolutely fantastic and very well-written post he wrote in the aftermath, he mentioned how meditating regularly on death, and having a memento mori has really helped him to live his life to the fullest.
Ian suggests some alternatives:
Back to Ian’s article and he turns to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus for some advice:
Source: W. Ian O’Byrne
[audio src=“http://188.166.96.48/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/episode-005.mp3”][/audio]
Thinking through an approach to building Project MoodleNet that came to me this weekend, using Google search, Amazon filtering, and the Pinterest browser button as mental models.
Links:
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book is out, which made me think about his previous work, Antifragile (which I enjoyed greatly).
As Shane Parrish quotes in a 2014 article on the subject, Taleb defines antifragility in the following way:
Parrish quotes Buster Benson who boils Taleb’s book down to one general, underlying principle:
Source: Farnam Street
“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else."
(Fred Rogers)
A quick one to note that the entire archive (1972-2018) of Radical Philosophy is now online. It describes itself as a “UK-based journal of socialist and feminist philosophy” and there’s articles in there from Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Richard Rorty.
Source: Open Culture
An interesting post from Austin Kleon on whether tools matter. It was prompted by the image accompanying this post, which met with some objections when he shared it with others:
If you are just starting off and I tell you exactly how I work, right down to the brand of pen and notebook, I am, in a some small sense, robbing you of the experience of finding your own materials and your own way of working. It’s been interesting seeing Bryan Mathers' journey over the last five years. I’ve seen him go from using basic apps which work ‘just fine’ to reaching the limits of those and having to upgrade to more powerful stuff. That’s a voyage of discovery, but along the way it’s absolutely useful to find out what other people use.
Kleon points out that we can do better than tool-related questions:
Note to self: update the version of this I did back in 2011.
Source: Austin Kleon
I really enjoy Aeon’s articles, and probably should think about becoming a paying subscriber. They make me think.
This one is about your identity and how much of it is bound up with your smartphone:
This is known as the ‘extended mind thesis’.
Source: Aeon
[audio src=“http://188.166.96.48/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/microcast-004.mp3”][/audio] Is it really a ‘skills gap’ that we should be talking about? What’s the real problem here?
Links:
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
(Virginia Woolf)
[audio src=“http://188.166.96.48/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/microcast-003.mp3”][/audio] What technologies are going to be used with Project MoodleNet?
Links:
“Those who research world-class performance focus only on what students do in the gym or track or practice room. Everyone focuses on the most obvious, measurable forms of work and tries to make these more effective and more productive. They don’t ask whether there are other ways to improve performance, and improve your life.
This is how we’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.”
(Alex Soojung-Kim Pang)
Not only is Hacker News a great place to find the latest news about tech-related stuff, it’s also got some interesting ‘Ask HN’ threads sourcing recommendations from the community.
This particular one starts with a user posing the question:
Please share what tools & approaches you use - it may Scratch, Python, any kids specific like Linux distros, Raspberry Pi or recent products like Lego Boost… Or your experiences with them.. thanks. Like sites such as Reddit and Stack Overflow, responses are voted up based on their usefulness. The most-upvoted response was this one:
I approached it this way, I bought a book on Scratch Jr so I could get up to speed on it. I walked her through a few of the basics, and then I just let her take over after that.
One other programming related activity we have done is the Learning Resources Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity. She has a lot of fun with this as you have a small mouse you program with simple directions to navigate a maze to find the cheese. It uses a set of cards to help then grasp the steps needed. I switch to not using the cards after a while. We now just step the mouse through the maze manually adding steps as we go.
One other activity to consider is the robot turtles board game. This teaches some basic logic concepts needed in programming.
For an older child, I did help my nephew to learn programming in Python when he was a freshman in high school. I took the approach of having him type in games from the free Python book. I have always though this was a good approach for older kids to get the familiar with the syntax.
Something else I would consider would be a robot that can be programmer with Scratch. While I have not done this yet, I think for kid seeing the physical results of programming via a robot is a powerful way to capture interest. But I think my favourite response is this one:
The key is fun. The focus is much more on ‘building something together’ than ‘I’ll learn you how to code’. I’m pretty sure that if I were to press them into learning how to code it will only put them off. Sometimes we go for weeks without building on the robot, and all of the sudden she will ask me to work on it with her again. My son is sailing through his Computer Science classes at school because of some webmaking and ‘coding’ stuff we did when he was younger. He’s seldom interested, however, if I want to break out the Raspberry Pi and have a play.
At the end of the day, it’s meeting them where they’re at. If they show an interest, run with it!
Source: Hacker News
[audio src=“http://188.166.96.48/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/episode-002.mp3”][/audio] What’s Doug working on this week?
Links:
“I learned that a long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.”
(Seth Godin)
This article from 2012 was referenced in something I was reading last week:
But making friends in your thirties seems to be something that’s difficult for many people. Not that I’m overly-concerned about it, to be honest. A good Stoic should be self-contained.
The article makes a good point about differences that don’t seem to matter when people are younger. For example, coming from a wealthy family (or having a job that pays well) seems to somehow play a bigger role.
And then…
Ultimately, though, there’s more at work here than just life changes happening to us.
Manipulators, drama queens, egomaniacs: a lot of them just no longer make the cut. Well, exactly. And I think things are different for men and women (as well as, I guess, those who don’t strongly identify as either).
Source: The New York Times
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[audio src=“http://188.166.96.48/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/episode-000.mp3”][/audio] Just setting this thing up with the assistance of my two children…
I came across this via a chain of links that took me down a rabbithole. I’m pretty sure it started with an article referenced on Hacker News, but I’m not sure.
In any case, I thought it was pretty interesting. Basically someone who self-identifies as a geek giving other geeks some advice. Having said that, it’s probably applicable more widely than that, particularly among men.
Here’s a taste:
“Wouldn’t it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!”
If you groaned at that last paragraph, you may be a recovering GSF4 carrier.
GSF4 is the belief that any two of your friends ought to be friends with each other, and if they’re not, something is Very Wrong.
The milder form of GSF4 merely prevents the carrier from perceiving evidence to contradict it; a carrier will refuse to comprehend that two of their friends (or two groups of friends) don’t much care for each other, and will continue to try to bring them together at social events. They may even maintain that a full-scale vendetta is just a misunderstanding between friends that could easily be resolved if the principals would just sit down to talk it out.
A more serious form of GSF4 becomes another “friendship test” fallacy: if you have a friend A, and a friend B, but A & B are not friends, then one of them must not really be your friend at all. It is surprisingly common for a carrier, when faced with two friends who don’t get along, to simply drop one of them.
On the other side of the equation, a carrier who doesn’t like a friend of a friend will often get very passive-aggressive and covertly hostile to the friend of a friend, while vigorously maintaining that we’re one big happy family and everyone is friends.
GSF4 can also lead carriers to make inappropriate requests of people they barely know – asking a friend’s roommate’s ex if they can crash on their couch, asking a college acquaintance from eight years ago for a letter of recommendation at their workplace, and so on. If something is appropriate to ask of a friend, it’s appropriate to ask of a friend of a friend.
Arguably, Friendster was designed by a GSF4 carrier. Hilarious and insightful at the same time.
Source: Plausibly Deniable
How many failed ‘social’ and ‘chat’ products has Google racked up now? Despite that, their new Slack competitor, Hangouts Chat looks promising:
To be clear, Hangouts Chat is a totally separate and distinct service from Hangouts proper, which still lives in your Google mail inbox. And while we’ll forgive you for rolling your eyes at yet another chat service from Google (the number of different apps the company has built is legendary at the point), Hangouts Chat does offer something potentially valuable to companies using G Suite – assuming they’re not on Slack already.
Source: Engadget
I do like MIT’s Technology Review. It gives a glimpse of cool future uses of technology, while retaining a critical lens.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Yep, you read that headline correctly. Vodafone and Nokia are getting huge amounts of publicitly for partnering with scientists to put a 4G network on the moon.
Why? Because it takes too much power to beam back high-definition video directly from the lunar rovers to the earth. So, instead, it’ll be relayed over a data network on the moon and then transmitted back to earth.
It’s totally a marketing thing for Vodafone and Nokia, but it also sounds totally cool…
Source: BBC News
“The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.”
(Arthur C. Clarke)
As with every episode so far, I greatly enjoyed listening to a recent episode of the Hurry Slowly podcast, this time with interviewee Bill Duggan. He had some great words of wisdom to share, including:
Source: Hurry Slowly
As I’ve mentioned before, my new role at Moodle is essentially one of a product manager. I’ve done things which overlap the different elements of the role before but never had them in this combination:
Here’s a few that I hadn’t heard of before:
TinyPM: Lightweight and smart agile collaboration tool with product management, backlog, taskboard, user stories and wiki.
Roadmunk: Visual roadmap software for product management.
Sprint.ly: Agile project management software for your whole team.
UXCam: Allows you to eliminate customer struggle and improve user experience by capturing and visualizing screen video and user interaction data. The definition at the top of this post comes from a whole guide put together for new Product Managers by Aha!
Sources: Aha! / Product Manager HQ
I still have a couple of Firefox OS phones from my time at Mozilla. The idea was brilliant: using the web as the platform for smartphones. The execution, in terms of the partnership and messaging to the market… not so great.
Last weekend, I actually booted up a device as my daughter was asking about ‘that orange phone you used to let me play with sometimes’. I noticed that Mozilla are discontinuing the app marketplace next month.
All is not lost, however, as open source projects can never truly die. This article reports on a ‘fork’ of Firefox OS being used to resurrect one of my favourite-ever phones, which was used in the film The Matrix:
Source: TechCrunch
This is really interesting:
Using an imagery-perception repetition paradigm, the team found that auditory imagery will decrease the sensitivity of actual loudness perception, with support from both behavioural loudness ratings and human electrophysiological (EEG and MEG) results.
“That is, after imagined speaking in your mind, the actual sounds you hear will become softer – the louder the volume during imagery, the softer perception will be,” explains Tian, assistant professor of neural and cognitive sciences at NYU Shanghai. “This is because imagery and perception activate the same auditory brain areas. The preceding imagery already activates the auditory areas once, and when the same brain regions are needed for perception, they are ‘tired’ and will respond less." This is why meditation, both in terms of trying to still your mind, and meditating on positive things you read, is such a useful activity.
As anyone who’s studied philosophy, psychology, and/or neuroscience knows, we don’t experience the world directly, but find ways to interpret the “bloomin' buzzin' confusion”:
People like deadlines because people like accountability. There’s nothing wrong with that, apart from the fact that sometimes it’s impossible to know how long something will take, or cost, or even look like in advance. Creativity, in other words, is at odds with arbitrary deadlines:
Creative people, she adds, “have to be protected. They have to be isolated in a way, from all the other stuff that comes up during a work day. They can’t be called into meetings that are unrelated to this serious problem that they’re trying to address.” Source: Quartz
People like deadlines because people like accountability. There’s nothing wrong with that, apart from the fact that sometimes it’s impossible to know how long something will take, or cost, or even look like in advance. Creativity, in other words, is at odds with arbitrary deadlines:
Creative people, she adds, “have to be protected. They have to be isolated in a way, from all the other stuff that comes up during a work day. They can’t be called into meetings that are unrelated to this serious problem that they’re trying to address.” Source: Quartz
I’ve been a blogger for around 13 years now. What the author of this post says about its value really resonates with me:
I’ve been a blogger for around 13 years now. What the author of this post says about its value really resonates with me:
As I’ve shared before, next to my bed at home I have a memento mori, an object to remind me before I go to sleep and when I get up that one day I will die. It kind of puts things in perspective.
As this article points out, organisational culture is a delicate balance between many things, including accountability and anonymity:
Source: opensource.com
As many readers of my work will know, I don’t have a Facebook account. This article uses Facebook as a proxy for something that, whether you’ve got an account on the world’s largest social network or not, will be familiar:
Source: The New York Times / BBC News
In this article from 2016, James Clear investigates motivation:
We can call this phenomenonThe Goldilocks Rule. The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right. But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to talk about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of peak performance, or ‘flow’ states:
Source: Lifehacker
This article is entitled ‘How not to replace email’ and details both the demise of Google Wave and it’s open source continuation, Apache Wave:
The world want ready for it in 2010, but now would seem to be the perfect time for something like Wave:
In fact, I’d argue that even having a system that’s a messaging system designed for “a paragraph or two” was on its own worthwhile: even Slack isn’t quite geared toward that, and contrariwise, email […] felt more heavyweight than that. Wave felt like it encouraged the right amount of information per message. I feel this too, and it’s actually something we’ve been talking about for internal communications at Moodle. Telegram, (which we use kind of like Slack) is good for short, sharp communication, but there’s a gulf between that and, say, an email conversation or threaded forum discussion.
Perhaps this is the sweet spot for the ‘social networking’ aspect of Project MoodleNet?
Those ideas and goals are sound, and this failure even provided good evidence that there’s a real need for something kind of like Wave: fifty thousand people signed a petition to “Save Google Wave” after Google announced they were shutting Wave down. Like so many petitions, it didn’t help (obviously), but if a mediocre implementation got tens of thousands of passionate fans, what could a good implementation do? Helpfully, the author outlines some projects he’s been part of, after stating (my emphasis):
Source: Jamey Sharp
Sometimes I think we’re living in the end times:
Source: The Globe and Mail
I’m on the fence on this as, on the one hand, email is an absolute bedrock of the internet, a common federated standard that we can rely upon independent of technological factionalism. On the other hand, so long as it’s built into a standard others can adopt, it could be pretty cool.
The author of this article really doesn’t like Google’s idea of extending AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to the inbox:
It sounds a little simplistic to say so, but people either like and value something and therefore use it, or they don’t. We who like and uphold standards need to remember that, instead of thinking about what people and organisations should and shouldn’t do.
Source: TechCrunch
I’m on the fence on this as, on the one hand, email is an absolute bedrock of the internet, a common federated standard that we can rely upon independent of technological factionalism. On the other hand, so long as it’s built into a standard others can adopt, it could be pretty cool.
The author of this article really doesn’t like Google’s idea of extending AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to the inbox:
It sounds a little simplistic to say so, but people either like and value something and therefore use it, or they don’t. We who like and uphold standards need to remember that, instead of thinking about what people and organisations should and shouldn’t do.
Source: TechCrunch
Using the example of the innovation of a customised home page from the early days of Flickr, this article helps break down how to delight users:
Try as it might, Google’s development team can only reduce the file-save problems to the point of it working 100% of the time. However, users will never say, “Google Docs is an awesome product because it saves my documents so well.” They just expect files to always be saved correctly. So it’s a process of continual improvement, and marginal gains in some areas:
Source: UIE
The answer is, “yes, probably”.
Source: The Irish Times
Can we teach machines to be ‘fully human’? It’s a fascinating question, as it makes us think carefully about what it actually means to be a human being.
Humans aren’t just about inputs and outputs. There’s some things that we ‘know’ in different ways. Take music, for example.
Source: Aeon
In this day and age it’s hard to know who to trust. I was raised to trust in authority but was particularly struck when I did a deep-dive into Vinay Gupta’s blog about the state being special only because it holds a monopoly on (legal) violence.
As an historian, I’m all too aware of the times that the state (usually represented by a monarch) has served to repress its citizens/subjects. It at least could pretend that it was protecting the majority of the people. As this article states:
Source: The Guardian
I read a lot of stuff, and I remember random bits of it. I used to be reasonably disciplined about bookmarking stuff, but then realised I hardly ever went back through my bookmarks. So, instead, I try to use what I read, which is kind of the reason for Thought Shrapnel…
One study showed that recalling details about episodes for those bingeing on Netflix series was much lower than for thoose who spaced them out. I guess that’s unsurprising.
Source: The Atlantic (via e180)
“Aim for the stars and maybe you’ll hit the treetops” was always the kind of advice I was given when I was younger. But extremely high expectations of oneself is not always a great thing. We have to learn that we’ve got limits. Some are physical, some are mental, and some are cultural:
I love internet memes and included a few in my TEDx talk a few years ago. The term ‘meme’ comes from Richard Dawkins who coined the term in the 1970s:
Source: Nautilus
I taught History for years, and when I was teaching the Black Death, I inculcated the received wisdom that it was rats that were responsible for the spread of disease.
The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, uses records of its pattern and scale. There are three candidates for the spread of the Black Death: rats, air, and lice/fleas:
It mirrored how quickly it spread and how many people it affected.
“The conclusion was very clear,” said Prof Stenseth. “The lice model fits best." Apologies to all those I taught the incorrect cause! I hope it hasn’t affected you too much in later life…
Source: BBC News
The older I get, the more important (and the more immediately apparent) the health benefits from eating and exercising well.
This article reports on scientists studying 1,000 different foods for their health benefits:
Time for some more experimentation…
Source: BBC Future
I don’t usually go in for detailed technical papers on stuff that’s not directly relevant to what I’m working on, but I made an exception for this. Here’s the abstract:
So how does it work?
Source: Arxiv
Apparently, the idea of learning while you sleep is actually bollocks, at least the way we have come to believe it works:
Source: Aeon
Although he isn’t aware, it was Frank Chimero who came up with the name Thought Shrapnel in a throwaway comment he made on his blog a while back. I immediately registered the domain name.
In this article, a write-up of a talk he’s been giving recently, Chimero talks about getting back into web design after a few years away founding a company.
He finishes with some powerful words:
This made me smile, then it made me think. Our children are offspring of a current teacher and a former teacher. What difference does our structure and rules make to their happiness?
This article from the ongoing Book of Life compares and contrasts two families. The first is what would generally be regarded as a ‘good’ family, where the children are well-behaved and interactions pleasant. However:
I come across so many interesting links every day that I can only post a handful of them. Right now, and only a couple of months after starting this approach to Thought Shrapnel, I’ve got around 50 draft posts! This was one of them, from early January.
Telegram is great. I’ve been using it for the past couple of years with my wife, for the past year with my son and parents, and the past three months or so with Moodle. It’s an extremely useful platform, as it’s so quick to send messages. Reliable too, which my wife and I found Signal to struggle with sometimes.
The brothers behind Telegram made their billions from creating VKontakte (usually shortened to ‘VK’ and known as the ‘Russian Facebook’). They’ve announced that Telegram will raise millions of dollars through an ‘ICO’ or Initial Coin Offering. This uses similar terminology to an Initial Public Offering, or IPO, which comes through a company becoming publicly listed on a stock exchange. An ICO, on the other hand, is actually more like equity crowdfunding using cryptocurrency:
Source: TechCrunch
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
TorrentFreak reports that Science Hub (commonly referred to as ‘Sci-Hub’) has had its account with Cloudflare terminated. Sci-Hub is sometimes known as ‘the Piratebay of Science’ as, in the words of Wikipedia, it “bypasses publisher paywalls by allowing access through educational institution proxies”:
The RIAA argued that Cloudflare was operating “in active concert or participation” with the pirates. The CDN provider objected, but the court eventually ordered Cloudflare to take action, although it did not rule on the “active concert or participation” part.
In the Sci-Hub case “active concert or participation” is also a requirement for the injunction to apply. While it specifically mentions ISPs and search engines, ACS Director Glenn Ruskin previously stressed that companies won’t be targeted for simply linking users to Sci-Hub. Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and I use their service on my sites, to improve web performance and security. They are the subject of some controversy at the moment, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation note:
Sources: TorrentFreak / EFF
Everyone wants ‘decentralisation’ these days, whether it’s the way we make payments, or… well, pretty much anything that can be put on a blockchain.
But what does that actually mean in practice? What, as William James would say, is the ‘cash value’ of decentralisation? This article explores some of that:
m is that consumer choice is limited. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other tech giants “own” a large part of the social graph that both powers the core digital connection goodness and sustains the momentum that they will keep owning it, due to something called Metcalfe’s law. If you want to connect to people on the internet, you have to play by their rules. So what can we do?
[…]
The solution is technological standardization. Individuals, mostly engineers, need to expend a lot more effort contributing to the protocols and processes that drive inter-application communication. Your core Facebook identity – your username, your connections, your chat history – should be a universally standardized protocol with a Democracy-scale process for updating and extending it. Crucially, that process needs to be directed outside the direct control of tech companies, who are capitalistically bound to monopolize and direct control back to their domains. It’s worth quoting the last paragraph:
I was a teenager when Dolly the sheep was cloned. It made me wonder why evolution seemed to favour species producing offspring from two parents. Why don’t creatures just clone themselves?
Well, it turns out that a new species of crayfish is doing exactly that:
Source: The New York Times
My Great Aunt, who we were close to, developed Alzheimer’s Disease towards the end of her life. This article claims that scientific evidence points to a link between the condition and diabetes:
Source: The Atlantic
Dudes make millions (or billions) of dollars via cryptocurrency. Hurricane hits Puerto Rico. They decide to build a new state.
Source: The New York Times
“Decide whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying.” (Amelia Earhart)
My wife and I are fans of Common Sense Media, and often use their film and TV reviews when deciding what to watch as a family. In their newsletter, they had a link to an article about strategies to help kids create media, rather than just consume it:
Source: Common Sense Media
Image: Amy Burvall (you can hire her)
I’m taking an online course about the impending General Data Protection Regulatin (GDPR), which I’ve writing about on my personal blog. An article in WIRED talks about the potential it will have, along with technologies such as blockchain.
People have talked about everyone having ‘private data accounts’ which they then choose to hook up to service providers for years. GDPR might just force that to happen:
Source: WIRED
The historian and social commentator in me found this fascinating. This article quotes Twitter user G. Willow Wilson (who claims to have liven in a dictatorship) as saying:
The difference is the steady disappearance of dissent from the public sphere. Anti-regime bloggers disappear. Dissident political parties are declared “illegal.” Certain books vanish from the libraries. If you click through to the actual Twitter thread, Wilson continues:
Source: Kottke.org
This is an interesting read on team and organisational culture in practice. Interesting choice of image, too (I’ve used a different one).
Source: Jocelyn Goldfein (via Offscreen Magazine)
This is an interesting read on team and organisational culture in practice. Interesting choice of image, too (I’ve used a different one).
Source: Jocelyn Goldfein (via Offscreen Magazine)
When debating with people, one of my go-to approaches is getting them to think through the logical consequences of their actions. Effectively, I’m a serial invoker of Kant’s categorical imperative: what would happen if everyone acted like this?
This article gets people to think about a world full of vegans:
Source: Aeon
Austin Kleon reflects on the following quotation from Jean-Michel Basquiat:
Source: Austin Kleon
Austin Kleon reflects on the following quotation from Jean-Michel Basquiat:
Source: Austin Kleon
This kind of article is useful in that it shows to a mainstream audience the benefits of a redecentralised web and resistance to Big Tech.
What they are doing could be seen as the online world’s equivalent of punk rock: a scattered revolt against an industry that many now think has grown greedy, intrusive and arrogant – as well as governments whose surveillance programmes have fuelled the same anxieties. As concerns grow about an online realm dominated by a few huge corporations, everyone involved shares one common goal: a comprehensively decentralised internet. However, these kind of articles are very personality-driven, and the little asides made the article’s author paint those featured as a bit crazy and the whole idea as a bit far-fetched.
For example, here’s the section on a project which is doing some pretty advanced tech while avoiding venture capitalist money:
Source: The Guardian
This kind of article is useful in that it shows to a mainstream audience the benefits of a redecentralised web and resistance to Big Tech.
What they are doing could be seen as the online world’s equivalent of punk rock: a scattered revolt against an industry that many now think has grown greedy, intrusive and arrogant – as well as governments whose surveillance programmes have fuelled the same anxieties. As concerns grow about an online realm dominated by a few huge corporations, everyone involved shares one common goal: a comprehensively decentralised internet. However, these kind of articles are very personality-driven, and the little asides made the article’s author paint those featured as a bit crazy and the whole idea as a bit far-fetched.
For example, here’s the section on a project which is doing some pretty advanced tech while avoiding venture capitalist money:
Source: The Guardian
I didn’t used to think that who came up with the name of a thing particularly mattered, nor how it came about.
I’ve changed my mind, however, as the history of these things also potentially tells you about their future. In this article, Christine Peterson outlines how she came up with the term ‘open source’:
Source: opensource.com
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” (Helen Keller)
I had reason this week to revisit Dorian Taylor’s interview on Uses This. I fell into a rabbithole of his work, and came across a lengthy post he wrote back in 2014.
I had reason this week to revisit Dorian Taylor’s interview on Uses This. I fell into a rabbithole of his work, and came across a lengthy post he wrote back in 2014.
“Whoever promises everything, promises nothing, and promises are a trap for fools.” (Baltasar Gracián)
This article is too long and written in a way that could be more direct, but it still makes some good points. Perhaps the best bit is the comparison of iOS lockscreen (left) with a redesigned one (right).
He does, however, make a good point about a shift towards people feeling they have to act in a particular way:
Source: Human Systems
Paul Ford is venerated in Silicon Valley and, based on what I’ve read of his, for good reason. He describes himself as a ‘reluctant capitalist’.
In this post from last year, he discusses building a positive organisational culture:
Source: Track Changes (via Offscreen newsletter /48)
My son, who’s now 11 years old, used to have iA’s Web Trends Map v4 on his wall. It was produced in 2009, when he was two:
I used it to explain the web to him, as the subway map was a metaphor he could grasp. I’d wondered why iA hadn’t produced more in subsequent years.
Well, the answer is clear in a recent post:
Source: iA
Say what you want about teaching, it makes it extremely easy to answer the above question.
Unfortunately, unlike the ubiquitous, “So, do you do?” none of these are useful as conversation-starters. And then, after I’ve corrected for Britishness, there’s exactly zero I’d use in the course of serious adult conversation…
Source: Harvard Business Review
I was talking about this last night with a guy who used to be in the army. It’s a BFD.
Audrey Watters answers the question whether we’re ‘addicted’ to technology:
Source: Audrey Watters
The ‘cashless’ society, eh?
Blockchains won’t be untaxable. The ones which truly are unbreakable will be made illegal; the ones that remain, well, it’s a ledger with every transaction on it, for goodness sakes. It’s this bit that concerns me:
If you do not understand why this is not just bad, but terrible, I cannot explain it to you. You have some sort of mental impairment of imagination and ethics. Source: Ian Welsh
It’s been almost 15 years since I suffered from depression. Since that time, I’ve learned to look after myself mentally and physically to resist whatever natural tendency I have towards spiralling downwards.
I found this article fascinating.
If you asked me what I do for a living, I’d probably respond that I work for Moodle, am co-founder of a co-op, and also do some consultancy. What I probably wouldn’t say, although it would be true, is that I’m a product manager.
I’m not particularly focused on ‘commercial success’ but the following section of this article certainly resonates:
[…]
A sense of discipline in the daily tasks such as sprint planning and retrospectives, collecting feedback from users, stand up meetings and such can be seen as something that is not just done for the purpose of order and structure, but as a way of reinforcing and democratizing the institutional knowledge between members of a team. The ability for a team to pivot, the ability to reach consensus, is a byproduct of common, centralized knowledge that is built up from daily actions and maintained and kept alive by the product manager. In the rush of a delivery and of creative chaos , this sense of structure and order has to be lovingly maintained by someone in order for a team to really internally benefit from the fruits of their labour over time. It’s a great article, and well worth a read.
Source: We Seek
I’ve seen conflicting advice regarding using Virtual Reality (VR) with kids, so it’s good to see this from the LSE:
Source: Parenting for a Digital Future
There were a couple of exciting announcments last week about web technologies being used for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Using standard technologies that can be used across a range of devices is a game-changer.
First off, Google announced ‘Article’ which provides an straightforward way to add virtual objects to physical spaces.
Mozilla, meanwhile directed attention towards A-Frame, which they’ve been supporting for a while. This allows VR experiences to be created using web technologies, including networking users together in-world.
Although each have their uses, I think AR is going to be a much bigger deal than Virtual Reality (VR) for most people, mainly because it adds to an experience we’re used to (i.e. the world around us) rather than replacing it.
Sources: Google blog / A-Frame
I’ve been to the Bett Show (formely known as BETT, which is how the author refers to it in this article) in many different guises. I’ve been as a classroom teacher, school senior leader, researcher in Higher Education, when I was working in different roles at Mozilla, as a consultant, and now in my role at Moodle.
I go because it’s free, and because it’s a good place to meet up with people I see rarely. While I’ve changed and grown up, the Bett Show is still much the same. As Junaid Mubeen, the author of this article, notes:
I like the questions Mubeen comes up with. However, the edtech companies are playing a different game. While there’s some interested in pedagogical development, for most of them it’s just another vertical market.
Source: Junaid Mubeen
In the last couple of years, there’s been a move to give names to security vulnerabilities that would be otherwise too arcane to discuss in the mainstream media. For example, back in 2014, Heartbleed, “a security bug in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which is a widely used implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol”, had not only a name but a logo.
The recent media storm around the so-called ‘Spectre’ and ‘Meltdown’ shows how effective this approach is. It also helps that they sound a little like James Bond science fiction.
In this article, Zeynep Tufekci argues that the security vulnerabilities are built on our collective desire for speed:
What I think the communities I’m part of could have done better at is shout loudly that there’s an option (c): open source software. No matter how old your hardware, the chances are that someone, somewhere, with the requisite skills will want to fix the vulnerabilities on that device.
Source: The New York Times
I’m thinking a lot about privacy and ethical design at the moment as part of my role leading Project MoodleNet. This article gives a short but useful overview of the Ethical Design Manifesto, along with some links for further reading:
Ethical user experience design – meaning, for example, designing technologies in ways that promote good online behaviour and intuit how they might be used – may help bridge that gap. There’s already people (like me) making choices about the technology and social networks they used based on ethics:
However, digital designers and tech companies are beginning to recognise that there is an ethical dimension to their work, and that they have some social responsibility for the well-being of their users.
Meeting this responsibility requires designers to anticipate the meanings people might create around a particular technology. In addition to ethical design, there are other elements to take into consideration:
Emotional design refers to technology that elicits appropriate emotional responses to create positive user experiences. It takes into account the connections people form with the objects they use, from pleasure and trust to fear and anxiety.
This includes the look and feel of a product, how easy it is to use and how we feel after we have used it.
Anticipatory design allows technology to predict the most useful interaction within a sea of options and make a decision for the user, thus “simplifying” the experience. Some companies may use anticipatory design in unethical ways that trick users into selecting an option that benefits the company. Source: The Conversation
Although it was less than a decade ago since the demise of the wonderful, simple, much-loved Google Reader, it seems like it was a different age entirely.
Subscribing to news feeds and blogs via RSS wasn’t as widely used as it could/should have been, but there was something magical about that period of time.
In this article, the author reflects on that era and suggests that we might want to give it another try:
[…]
On a similar note, many believe that blogging is making a return. Folks now seem to recognize the value of having your own little plot of land on the web and, although it’s still pretty complex to make your own website and control all that content, it’s worth it in the long run. No one can run ads against your thing. No one can mess with the styles. No one can censor or sunset your writing.
Not only that but when you finish making your website you will have gained superpowers: you now have an independent voice, a URL, and a home on the open web. I don’t think we can turn the clock back, but it does feel like there might be positive, future-focused ways of improving things through, for example, decentralisation.
Source: Robin Rendle
This is pretty incredible:
The technology works by analyzing the physical and behavioral features that make each person’s voice distinctive, such as the pitch, shape of the mouth, and length of the larynx. An algorithm then creates a dynamic computer model of the individual’s vocal characteristics. This is what’s popularly referred to as a “voiceprint.” The entire process — capturing a few spoken words, turning those words into a voiceprint, and comparing that representation to other “voiceprints” already stored in the database — can happen almost instantaneously. Although the NSA is known to rely on finger and face prints to identify targets, voiceprints, according to a 2008 agency document, are “where NSA reigns supreme.” Hmmm….
Source: The Intercept
“If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favourable to him.”
(Seneca)
I can attest to the power of this, particularly the Halo soundtrack:
This is, by far, the best Life Pro Tip I’ve ever gotten or given: Listen to music from video games when you need to focus. It’s a whole genre designed to simultaneously stimulate your senses and blend into the background of your brain, because that’s the point of the soundtrack. It has to engage you, the player, in a task without distracting from it. In fact, the best music would actually direct the listener to the task. These days I prefer to listen to Brain.fm after I got a lifetime deal via AppSumo a year or so ago. I enjoy music as an art form, but I also appreciate it for the effect it can have on my brain.
Source: Popular Science
People going to work in factories and offices is a relatively recent invention. For most of human history, people have worked from, or very near to, their home.
But working from home these days is qualitatively different, because we have the internet, as Sarah Jaffe points out in a recent newsletter:
[…]
The internet, then, serves to make work less isolated. I have chats going a lot of the day, unless I’m in super drill-down writing mode, which is less of my job than many people probably expect. My friends have helped me figure out thorny issues in a piece I’m writing and helped me figure out what to write in an email to an editor who’s dropped off the face of the earth and advised me on how much money to ask for. It’s funny, there are so many stories about the way the internet is making us lonely and isolated, and it is sometimes my only human contact. My voice creaked when I answered the phone this morning because I hadn’t yet used it today. The problem is that capitalism forces us into a situation where we’re competing with others rather than collaborating with them:
Source: Sarah Jaffe
I’m certainly attending fewer conferences than I used to, but I thought that was just the changing nature of my work and ways of making a living.
Marco Arment makes some important points in this post about how conferences are just kind of outdated as a concept:
Source: Marco.org
I’ve followed the IndieWeb movement since its inception, but it’s always seemed a bit niche. I love (and use) the POSSE model, for example, but expecting everyone to have domain of their own stacked with open source software seems a bit utopian right now.
I was surprised and delighted, therefore, to see a post on the GoDaddy blog extolling the virtues of the IndieWeb for business owners. The author explains that the IndieWeb movement was born of frustration:
Source: GoDaddy
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
(Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Mike Caulfield reflects on Facebook’s announcement that they’re going to allow users to rate the sources of news in terms of trustworthiness. Like me, and most people who have thought about this for more than two seconds, he thinks it’s a bad idea.
Instead, he thinks Facebook should try Google’s approach:
Source: Hapgood
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
(Ursula Le Guin)
Remote working, which I’ve done for over five years now, sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Open your laptop while still in bed, raid the biscuit barrel at every opportunity, spend more time with your family…
Don’t get me wrong, it is great and I don’t think I could ever go back to working full-time in an office. That being said, there’s a hidden side to remote working which no-one ever tells you about: anxiety.
Every interaction when you’re working remotely is an intentional act. You either have to schedule a meeting with someone, or ‘ping’ them to see if they’re available. You can’t see that they’re free, wander over to talk to them, or bump into them in the corridor, as you could if you were physically co-located.
When people don’t respond in a timely fashion, or within the time frame you were expecting, it’s unclear why that happened. This article picks up on that:
But there is also an understanding that you don’t have to reply to any message you receive immediately. As much as these communication tools are designed to be instant, they are also easily ignored. And ignore them we do. Texts go unanswered for hours or days, emails sit in inboxes for so long that “Sorry for the delayed response” has gone from earnest apology to punchline. It’s not just work, either. Because we carry our smartphones with us everywhere, my wife expects almost an instantaneous response on even the most trivial matters. I’ve come back to my phone with a stream of ‘oi’ messages before…
Source: The Atlantic (via Hurry Slowly)
Growing up, I always thought I’d write for a living. Initially, I wanted to be a journalist, but as it turns out, thinking and writing is about 75% of what I do on a weekly basis.
I’m always interested in how people who write full-time structure the process. This, from Jon McGregor, struck a chord with me:
It’s complicated.
Source: The Guardian
Despite no longer having a commute, I still find time to listen to podcasts. They’re useful for a variety of reasons: I can be doing something else while listening to them such as walking, going to the gym, or boring admin, and they don’t require me to look at a screen (which I do most of the day).
So it’s very useful for Bryan Alexander to share the podcasts he’s listening to at present. Here’s a couple that were new to me:
Very Bad Wizards – two thinkers and, sometimes, a guest brood about deep questions concerning human psychology, philosophy, and ethics. It’s not my usual fare, so I enjoy learning. Podcasts are basically RSS feeds with an audio enclosures as such, they can be exported as OPML files. Most podcast clients, including AntennaPod (which I use) allow you to do this.
Here’s my OPML file, as of today. I don’t listen to all of these podcasts regularly, just dipping in and out of them. My top five favourites are:
Source: Bryan Alexander
This year is a time of reckoning for the world’s most popular social network. From their own website (which I’ll link to via archive.org because I don’t link to Facebook). Note the use of the passive voice:
As an article in The Guardian points out, executives at Facebook and Twitter aren’t exactly heavy users of their own platforms:
While this sounds empowering and democratic, I can’t help but think it’s a bad move. As The Washington Post notes:
“If they demote stories that get a lot of likes, but drive people toward posts that generate conversation, they may be driving people toward conversation that isn’t positive,” Parakilas said. A final twist in the tale is that Rupert Murdoch, a guy who has no morals but certainly has a valid point here, has made a statement on all of this:
Sources: Facebook newsroom / The Guardian / The Washington Post / News Corp
I love this kind of stuff. As my daughter commented when I showed her, “we would be able to walk to Spain!”
I’ll try and explain what Amazon Go is without sounding a note of incredulity and rolling my eyes. It’s a shop where shoppers submit to constant surveillance for the slim reward of not having to line up to pay. Instead, they enter the shop by identifying themselves via the Amazon app on their smartphone, and their shopping is then charged to their account.
Ben Thompson zooms out from this to think about the ‘game’ Amazon is playing here:
In the case of Amazon Go specifically, all of those cameras and sensors and smartphone-reading gates are fixed costs as well — two types, in fact. The first is the actual cost of buying and installing the equipment; those costs, like rent, are incurred regardless of how much revenue the store ultimately produces. Just as Amazon built amazingly scalable server technology and then opened it out as a platform for others to build websites and apps upon, so Thompson sees Amazon Go as the first move in the long game of providing technology to other shops/brands.
This is all related to points made about the changing nature of work by Harold Jarche in a new article he’s written:
Sources: Stratechery and Harold Jarche
I have to say, I was quite dismissive of the impact of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when I first heard about it. I thought it was going to be another debacle like the ‘this website uses cookies’ thing.
However, I have to say I’m impressed with what’s going to happen in May. It’s going to have a worldwide impact, too — as this article explains:
It’s a big deal:
Source: TechCrunch
What this article calls ‘Decentralisation 2.0’ is actually redecentralising the web. There’s an urgent need:
Source: The Next Web
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”
(Martin Luther King)
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”
(Martin Luther King)
Email is an open, federated standard. You can’t kill it.
Newsletters, based on email, are a great bet for organisations, brands, and individuals looking to build an audience.
I very much enjoy publishing both this blog, and then curating the links into the weekly newsletter. I wish more people would do likewise!
Source: The Independent
This is a lovely post, full of insights and humour. A designer, now at Google but originally an intern at Apple, talks about the first iterations of their emoji.
My favourite part:
A fantastic read, really made my day.
Source: Angela Guzman
This is a lovely post, full of insights and humour. A designer, now at Google but originally an intern at Apple, talks about the first iterations of their emoji.
My favourite part:
A fantastic read, really made my day.
Source: Angela Guzman
I’ve started buying the Financial Times Weekend along with The Observer each Sunday. Annoyingly, while the latter doesn’t have a paywall, the FT does which means although I can quote from, and link to, this article by Simon Kuper about tribal politics, many of you won’t be able to read it in full.
Kuper makes the point that in a world of temporary jobs, ‘broken’ families, and declining church attendance, social networks provide a place where people can find their ‘tribe’:
On the other hand, social networks are mediated by technology. And technology is never neutral. For example, Facebook has gone from saying that it couldn’t possibly be blamed for ‘fake news’ (2016) to investigating the way that Russian accounts may have manipulated users (2017) to announcing that they’re going to make some changes (2018, NSFW language in link).
We need to zoom out from specific problems in our society to the wider issues that underpin them. Kuper does this to some extent in this article, but the FT isn’t the place where you’ll see a robust criticism of the problems with capitalism. Social networks can, and have, been different — just think of what Twitter was like before becoming a publicly-traded company, for example.
My concern is that we need to sort out these huge, society-changing companies before they become too large to regulate.
Source: FT Weekend
Last weekend, and on the day before The Guardian changed to a new, smaller format, Tim Lott, one of my favourite columnists, wrote his last article.
It contains “a few principles worth thinking about if you hope for a functional family life”. There’s some gems in the short article.
Given our recurring conversations about whether or not to move to a bigger house, I found this reassuring:
And then, as a parent of two strong-minded, wilful, but ultimately pleasant children, this also reassured me:
Source: The Guardian
I’m not sure that just because you look at a screen all day means you’ve got a ‘bullshit job’, but this article nevertheless makes some good points:
Source: The Guardian
I love the style of these posters, published in a new book to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
So creative!
Source: i-D
Another fantastic article from Tim Carmody, a.k.a. Dr. Time:
However.
I have also watched a lot (and I mean a lot) of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And while I feel pretty comfortable talking about “it” in the context of the speaker that’s sitting on the table across the room—there’s even a certain rebellious jouissance to it, since I’m spiting the technology companies whose products I use but whose intrusion into my life I resent—I feel decidedly uncomfortable declaring once and for all time that any and all AI assistants can be reduced to an “it.” It forecloses on a possibility of personhood and opens up ethical dilemmas I’d really rather avoid, even if that personhood seems decidedly unrealized at the moment. I’m really enjoying his new ‘column’ as well as Noticing, the newsletter he curates.
Source: kottke.org
“The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected.”
(Bertrand Russell)
I’m a big fan of The Book of Life, a project of The School of Life. One of the latest updates to this project is about the pervasive use of smartphones in society.
I feel this. I want my mind to wander, but I also kind of want to be informed. I want to be entertained.
The diminutive digital assistants in our pockets do our bidding and unlock a multitude of possibilities.
It’s a cliché to say that it’s the small things in life that make it worth living, but it’s true.
Every technology is a ‘bridging’ technology in the sense of coming after something less sophisticated, and before something more sophisticated. My hope is that we iterate towards, rather than away, from what makes us human.
As ever, a fantastic article.
Source: The Book of Life
“At times you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”
(Alan Alda)
Ben Williamson shines a light on the organisation behind the PISA testing regime moving into the realm of social and emotional skills:
I really can’t stand this kind of stuff. Using proxies for the thing instead of trying to engender a more holistic form of education. It’s reductionist and instrumentalist.
If you create data, people will use that data to judge students and rank them. Of course they will.
This is not a positive development.
Source: Code Acts in Education
The inimitable Cal Newport, he of Deep Work fame, turns his attention to Bullet Journals:
Cal therefore recommends some modifications:
Source: Cal Newport
The Verge reports back from CES, the yearly gathering where people usually get excited about shiny thing. This year, however, people are bit more wary…
Source: The Verge
“The point is… to live one’s life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstasy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilised being who glides in the surface and fits smoothly into the world.”
(Thomas Nagel)
I love everything about this post:
[…]
So tweets and text messages aren’t oral. They’re secondarily literate. Wait, that sounds horrible! How’s this: they’re artifacts and examples of secondary literacy. They’re what literacy looks like after television, the telephone, and the application of computing technologies to those communication forms. Just as orality isn’t the same after you’ve introduced writing, and manuscript isn’t the same after you’ve produced print, literacy isn’t the same once you have networked orality. In this sense, Twitter is the necessary byproduct of television.t The author finally gets around to voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri towards the end. I’ve already quoted enough, so I encourage you to check it out in full.
Source: kottke.org
In the light of the recent false alarm about the nuclear attack on her home of Hawaii, Amy Burvall shared this website in our Slack channel.
You can play about with it to find out what would be the effect of different sized nuclear bombs hitting somewhere near to you. I live in Morpeth, Northumberland, UK so, as you can see from the map below, although we may die from radiation poisoning, an attack on our nearest city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne wouldn’t flatten buildings here.
Makes you think.
Source: NUKEMAP
I’m (sadly) pretty monolingual, but as an historian by training find things like this fascinating:
The post continues with a discussion of ‘diacritical marks’ used in other languages such as German and Czech. The author, who is also a type designer, has promised a follow-up post on uses of the letter ‘Å’ in contemporary typefaces.
Source: Frode Helland
“Getting better at using tools comes to us, in part, when the tools challenge us, and this challenge often occurs just because the tools are not fit-for-purpose. They may not be good enough, or it’s hard to figure out how to use them. The challenge becomes greater when we are obliged to use these tools to repair or undo mistakes. In both creation and repair, the challenge can be met by adapting the form of a tool, or improvising with it as it is, using it in ways it was not meant for. However we come to use it, the very incompleteness of the tool has taught us something.
(Richard Sennett, The Craftsman)
I missed the Mozilla Festival at the end of October 2017 as I’d already booked my family holiday by the time they announced the dates.
It’s always a great event and attracts some super-smart people doing some great thinking and creating on and with the open web.
Mark Boas co-curated the Decentralisation Space at MozFest, and recently wrote up his experiences.
His post, which mentions the session that was run by my co-op colleagues John Bevan and Bryan Mathers, is a veritable treasure trove of resources to explore further.
Source: maboa.it
You’d think with anyone, anywhere, being able to post anything to a global audience, that this would be a golden age of free speech. Right?
Source: WIRED
A really interesting post about open source apps, most of which I’ve never come across!
Will be exploring with interest.
Source: opensource.com
Algorithms and artificial intelligence are an increasingly-normal part of our everyday lives, notes this article, so the next step is in the workplace:
Source: Harvard Business Review
“The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s technology.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
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David Byrne, a talented musician and author of one of my favourite books, has started a great new project:
As a kind of remedy and possibly as a kind of therapy, I started collecting good news that reminded me, “Hey, there’s actually some positive stuff going on!” Almost all of these initiatives are local, they come from cities or small regions who have taken it upon themselves to try something that might offer a better alternative than what exits. Hope is often local. Change begins in communities. The website will include material that falls into some pre-defined categories:
Source: Reasons to be Cheerful
Cory Doctorow writes:
Using a metaphor from virology, he notes that we become to immune to certain types of manipulation over time:
However, the thing I’m concerned about is the kind of AI-based manipulation that is forever shape-shifting. How do we become immune to a moving target?
Source: Locus magazine
Great news for the open source community!
It also looks like it could be the start of a movement:
It is an initiative of the Free Software Foundation of Europe and comes after an open letter that advocates that software funded publicly should be free. This call has been supported by more than about 15,000 individuals and more than 100 organizations.
Source: It’s FOSS
Last year, I remember being amazed by how black a new substance was that’s been created by scientists. Called Vantablack, it’s like a black hole for light:
However, it turns out that Mother Nature already had that trick up her sleeve. Birds of Paradise have a similar ability:
These unique structures excel at capturing light. When light hits a normal feather, it finds a series of horizontal surfaces, and can easily bounce off. But when light hits a super-black feather, it finds a tangled mess of mostly vertical surfaces. Instead of being reflected away, it bounces repeatedly between the barbules and their spikes. With each bounce, a little more of it gets absorbed. Light loses itself within the feathers.
Incredible.
Source: The Atlantic
Here’s another article that was linked to from the source of a post I shared recently. The paragraph quoted here is from the section entitled ‘Consent-Oriented Architecture’:
In short, to ensure Project MoodleNet is a consensual social network, we need to ensure full transparency and, if possible, that the majority of the processing of personal data is done on the user’s own device.
Source: P2P Foundation
A marvellous post by Ryan Holiday, who is well versed in Stoic philosophy:
Eventually, death—a forced suicide—was the only option. Money in, blood out.
You need to know what you stand for in life so you can politely decline those things that don’t mesh with your expectations and approach to life. This takes discipline, and discipline takes practice.
Source: Thought Catalog
As part of my Moodle work, I’ve been looking at GDPR and decentralised technologies, so I found the following interesting.
It’s worth pointing out that ‘disintermediation’ is the removal of intermediaries from a supply chain. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple specialise in ‘anti-disintermediation’ or plain old vendor lock-in. So ‘counter-anti-disintermediation’ is working against that in a forward-thinking way.
The linked slides from that article describe ‘venture communism’, an approach characterised by co-operative control, open federated systems, and commons ownership. Now that’s something I can get behind!
Source: P2P Foundation
This made me smile:
[…]
Itchy & Scratchy Land, Krustyland, and Duff Gardens are from The Simpsons; Anatomy Park is from Rick and Morty; Brisbyland is from Venture Bros.; Arctic World is from Batman Returns; Funland is from Scooby-Doo; Monkey Island is from a game of the same name (by Lucasarts); Walley World is from Vacation; and Pacific Playland (not pictured) is from Zombieland. I have unlimited love for the Monkey Island series of games. So much so that I’m afraid that if I replayed them as an adult I’d destroy part of my remembered youth.
Fun fact: Ron Gilbert, the creator of the first two Monkey Island games, wrote a blog post a few years ago about how he would approach making a new version. He’s not going to, though, sadly.
Source: io9
This is a fantastic resource for those who are thinking about their next move. Increasingly, it’s less about a one-way fit of you being right for the organisation, and as much about the organisation fitting you.
Just as your potential employers will evaluate you, I recommend intentionally thinking through what metrics and questions you’ll use to evaluate them. Here’s how. Really good advice, and as someone who’s just started a new job, I agree that these are exactly the questions you need to get right.
Source: Quartz
“The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.” (Sarah Ban Breathnach)
Appropriately enough, it was during a lunchtime run that I listened to the latest episode of Jocelyn K. Glei’s excellent podcast. It featured Alex Pang, writer and futurist, on the benefits of rest for the creative process.
He talked about a number of things, but it confirmed my belief that you can only really do four hours of focused, creative work per day. Of course, you can add status-update meetings and emails to that, but the core of anyone’s work should be this sustained, disciplined period of attention.
Source: Hurry Slowly
Great post by Seth Godin:
Create stuff that people value and that is in scarce supply. Focus on leaving the world a better place than you found it.
Source: Seth’s blog
There’s not much we mere mortals can do about the latest microprocessor-based vulnerabilites, except ensure we apply security patches immediately.
Source: xkcd
As someone who has suffered in the past from depression, and still occasionally suffers from anxiety, I find this an interesting article:
Source: The Guardian
Email is an awesome system. It’s open, decentralised, and you can pick whoever you want to provide your emails. The trouble is, of course, that if you decide you don’t want a certain company, say Google, to read your emails, you only have control of your half of the equation. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to use GMail, if most of your contacts do.
The same is true of AI assistant. You might not want an Amazon Echo device in your house, but you don’t spend all your life at home:
Source: TechCrunch
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I’m wondering whether to delete all my social media accounts, or whether I should stay and fight. The trouble is, no technology is neutral, it always contains biases.
It’s interesting how the narrative has changed since the 2011 revolutions in Iran and Egypt:
But social media has not helped these revolutions turn into lasting democracies. Social media speaks directly to the most reactive, least reflective parts of our minds, demanding we pay attention even when our calmer selves might tell us not to. It is no surprise that this form of media is especially effective at promoting hate, white supremacy, and public humiliation.
In my new job at Moodle, I’m tasked with leading work around a new social network for educators focused on sharing Open Educational Resources and professional development. I think we’ll start to see more social networks based around content than people (think Pinterest rather than Facebook).
Source: Motherboard
As an historian, I find this fascinating:
In 1940, General Francisco Franco changed Spain’s time zone, moving the clocks one hour forward in solidarity with Nazi Germany.
For Spaniards, who at the time were utterly devastated by the Spanish Civil War, complaining about the change did not even cross their minds. They continued to eat at the same time, but because the clocks had changed, their 1pm lunches became 2pm lunches, and they were suddenly eating their 8pm dinners at 9pm.
We were talking over Sunday dinner today how some traditions and practices can stick within families and organisations without them being questioned for years. This is an extreme example!
Source: BBC Travel
To have a settled position on anything is anachronistic. There has to be an element of ambiguity in your work and thinking, otherwise you’re dealing in what Richard Rorty called ‘dead metaphors’.
Foucault understood this by never espousing a theory of power:
Source: Aeon
I feel like I could have written this post. I agree entirely:
As an aside, the software running the blog, Kimonote, looks interesting:
I visit Product Hunt on a regular basis. While there’s plenty of examples of hyped apps and services that don’t last six months, there’s also some gems in there, especially in the Open Source section!
There’s a Q&A part of the site where this week I unearthed a great thread about privacy-based browser extensions. The top ones were:
The comments and shared experiences are particularly useful. Remember, the argument that you don’t need privacy because you’ve got nothing to hide is like saying you don’t need free speech because you’ve got nothing to say…
Source: Product Hunt
Twitter have confirmed what everyone knew all along: they’re not going to ban Donald Trump, no matter what he says or does. It’s too good for business.
It’s a weak, cowardly argument to infer that if Twitter doesn’t provide a platform for Trump, then someone else will. This is absolutely about their growth, absolutely about the fact they make software with shareholders.
Source: Twitter blog
Image via CNN
An interesting interview with Fred Turner, former journalist, Stanford professor, and someone who spends a lot of time studying the technology and culture of Silicon Valley.
Turner likens tech companies who try to do away with hierarchy to 1960s communes:
Source: Logic magazine
I’m a big fan of Cathy Davidson, and look forward to reading her new book. In this article, she explains that we’ve unleashed an ‘educational monster’ by forcing students to be memorisers rather than content creators:
Source: The Guardian
The Mozilla Foundation may have shut down pretty much all of its learning programmes, but it’s still doing interesting stuff around Open Leadership. Chad Sansing writes:
There’s also a white paper which they say will be updated in February 2018. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. Along with great work being done at opensource.com’s community around The Open Organization it’s a great time to be a open leader!
Source: Read, Write, Participate
England’s Children’s Commissioner has released a report entitled ‘Life in Likes’ which has gathered lots of attention in my networks. This, despite the fact that during the research they only talked to only 32 children. I used to teach over 250 kids a week! 32 is a class size, not a representative sample.
This article includes quotations from parents, such as this one:
He told BBC Radio 5 live: “I can’t say to them, ‘You can’t use that,’ when I use it."
Yes you can. My kids see me drink alcohol but it doesn’t mean I let them have it. My son has a smartphone with an app lock on the Google Play store so he can’t install apps without my permission.
The solution to this stuff does involve basic digital skills, but mainly what’s lacking here are parenting skills, I think.
Source: BBC News
I missed this at the end of last year, perhaps because I live in a small town in the north of England rather than a bustling metropolis:
These kitchens are anything but dark at peak times such as Friday or Saturday night, as noodles, pizza, curries and much more exotic—and increasingly, healthy—fare is sizzled up on a made-to-order basis while drivers for food delivery platforms such as Just Eat, Deliveroo, Seamless, and Uber Eats wait outside. Incredible and obvious at the same time.
Source: The Times
The rest of this month’s WIRED magazine is full of its usual hubris, but the section on ‘fixing the internet’ is actually pretty good. I particularly like Jaron Lanier’s framing of the problem we’ve got with advertising supporting the online economy:
The Opera web browser has joined Brave in allowing users to turn on ‘cryptojacking’ protection:
Given the recent explosive rise in Bitcoin’s value, however, it would seem that cryptojacking is yet another thing to guard against online…
Source: Opera blog
Fred Wilson is author of the incredibly popular blog AVC. He prefaces his first post of the year in the following way:
Source: AVC
Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist and author of World After Capital, invited his (sizeable) blog readership to suggest some books he should read over his Christmas and New Year’s break. The results are interesting, as there’s a mix of technical, business, and more discursive writing.
The ones that stood out for me were:
Source: Continuations
Good stuff from (Lord) Jim Knight, who cites part of his speech in the House of Lords about data privacy:
Jim’s a great guy, and went out of his way to help me in 2017. It’s great to have someone with his ethics and clout in a position of influence.
Source: Medium
I think the author’s correct to frame things in terms of addiction:
We don’t live in a cosy world where everyone hugs fluffy bunnies who shoot rainbows out of their eyes. Hacks and data breaches affect everyone:
Source: The New York Times
This is a useful way of framing things:
By my calculations, that gives me 13 hours more ‘free’ time than if was working in an office in my nearest city. It all adds up!
Source: Fast Company
“And if anything laborious, or pleasant or glorious inglourious be presented to you, remember that now is the contest, now are the Olympic games, and they cannot be deferred; and that it depends on one defeat and one giving way that progress is either lost or maintained. Socrates in this way became perfect, in all things improving himself, attending to nothing except to reason. But you, though you are not yet a Socrates, ought to live as one who wishes to be a Socrates.” (Epictetus)
Although I don’t use elementaryOS on my own laptops, we do use it on the family touchscreen PC in our main living space. It’s a beautifully-designed system, and I very much appreciate way the founders interact with their community in terms of updates, roadmap, and funding:
With their upcoming ‘Juno’ update based on Ubuntu 18.04, I may just switch to elementaryOS, as ‘Loki’ was good enough for me to voluntarily pay $25 for it, in an age when even proprietary operating systems are ‘free’
Source: elementaryOS blog
This article talks about hyperlinks, because that’s what mainstream audiences understand, but the issue is the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS):
Good DNS services speed up web sites, balance traffic loads and protect against a wide spectrum of cyber threats. Bad DNS makes sites slow and unstable and makes it easy for criminals to change the address of links on a web page to their malware. Source: ZDNet
There’s some great advice in this article for those, like me, who are leading innovation projects in 2018:
There’s a few books I read every morning, on repeat. One of them, Daily Rituals, details the everyday working lives of famous writers, painters, composers, and other well-known figures.
I was reading about Charles Darwin earlier this week, and the author of this article has a book that’s sitting waiting for me to read back at home:
This looks like a contradiction, or a balance that’s beyond the reach of most of us. It’s not. I’ve often sais that four hours of focused knowledge work is the maximum every day. Factor in emails, meetings, and admin, and the daily routine of figures such as Darwin’s seems abiut right.
Source: Nautilus
A collection of articles on organisational culture from the Harvard Business Review. I need to examine them in more depth, but the diagram above and paragraph below jumped out at me.
Some good stuff in Mike Caulfield’s “somewhat U.S.-centric predictions” for the coming year. In particular:
Source: Traces
Image: Washington Post, 1954 (via Spartacus Educational)
It was only last week that I was telling my children how they’d missed out on the joy of exploring CD inserts to find detailed information on tracks and random artwork.
This post gives 20 examples of great artwork from albums that came out in 2017. I do like Beck’s album, and not just because it’s got a badge-shaped cover:
Source: Creative Bloq
David Wiley, the standard bearer for Open Educational Resources, says:
Source: iterating toward openness
Image: CC BY Atelier Disko, Hamburg und Berlin
Dogger Bank, which thousands of years ago as Doggerland would have been visible from the North East of England where I live, is the proposed site for a huge new wind farm complex with a central island power hub.
While the actual engineering challenge of building the island seems enormous, Van der Hage is not daunted. “Is it difficult? In the Netherlands, when we see a piece of water we want to build islands or land. We’ve been doing that for centuries. That is not the biggest challenge,” he said. The short YouTube video is pretty cool.
Source: The Guardian
“A wise man needs few things to make him happy; nothing can satisfy a fool. That is why nearly all men are wretched.” (François de La Rochefoucauld)
“A wise man needs few things to make him happy; nothing can satisfy a fool. That is why nearly all men are wretched.” (François de La Rochefoucauld)
“A wise man needs few things to make him happy; nothing can satisfy a fool. That is why nearly all men are wretched.” (François de La Rochefoucauld)
It uses to be all about conspicuous consumption and bling…
All are lunatics, but he who can analyse his delusion is called a philosopher (Ambrose Bierce)
Good advice here about resolving difficulties with a remote co-worker.
I’m not sure I agree with the conclusions of this article, as I don’t agree with the (made-up) premises. At least it begins well:
Source: Harvard Business Review
That last-minute Christmas gift sounds like nothing but unadulterated fun after reading this, doesn’t it?
Software, once a mic is in place, governs when that microphone is live, when the audio it captures is transmitted over the Internet, and to whom it goes. Many devices are programmed to keep their microphones on at all times but only record and transmit audio after hearing a trigger phrase—in the case of the Echo, for example, “Alexa.” Any device that is to be activated by voice alone must work this way. There are a range of other systems. Samsung, after a privacy dust-up, assured the public that its smart televisions (like others) only record and transmit audio after the user presses a button on its remote control. The Hello Barbie toy only picks up and transmits audio when its user presses a button on the doll.
Software is invisible, however. Most companies do not make their code available for public inspection, and it can be hacked, or unscrupulous executives can lie about what it does (think Volkswagen), or government agencies might try to order companies to activate them as a surveillance device. I sincerely hope that policy makers pay heed to the recommendations section, especially given the current ‘Wild West’ state of affairs described in the article.
Source: ACLU
If something’s been pre-filtered by Cory Doctorow and Jason Kottke then you know it’s going to be good. Sure enough, the open memo, to all marginally-smart people/consumers of internet “content” by Foster Kamer, is right on the money:
Instead of reading stories that get to you because they’re popular, or just happen to be in your feed at that moment, you’ll read stories that get to you because you chose to go to them. Sounds simple, and insignificant, and almost too easy, right? On our flight yesterday, my son asked how I was still reading articles on my phone, despite it being in aeroplane mode. I took the opportunity to explain to him how RSS powers feed readers (I use and pay for Feedly) as well as podcasts.
This stuff sounds obvious and easy when you’ve grown up with the open web. But given that the big five tech companies seem to be trying to progressively de-skill consumers, we shouldn’t be complacent.
Source: Mashable
Audrey Watters is delightfully blunt about the New Media Consortium, known for their regular ‘Horizon reports’, shutting down:
In her review of Daniel Koretz’s new book on testing in schools, Diane Ravitch reminds us of Campbell’s law:
Perversely, it might take something like the Trump administration to make Open Badges work at scale. Why? Because Republicans don’t trust Higher Education:
Source: Education Design Lab
Good advice in this article for people who (like me) are asked regularly whether someone can ‘pick your brain’.
What I particularly like about this article is that it encourages readers to find ways to give back to their sector / profession:
Source: Quartz at Work
I discovered ‘John Henry’, the pseudonymous author of this blog, after finding and sharing another post from him earlier this week. He makes a good point in this one about building a home online.
It is peaceful in a sterilized, ephemeral way. The next day, I will be gone, and the cleaners will wipe any trace of my existence. It’s hard to disagree with his metaphor of our life online feeling about as cosy as Eeyore’s house:
In a hugely surprising move, Facebook has found that marking an article as ‘disputed’ on a user’s news feed and putting a red flag next to it makes them want to click on it more. 🙄
Source: Axios
This is an incredible entry in the School of Life’s Book of Life:
Source: The Book of Life
Rafael Behr nails it when he says we live in an ‘outrage economy’:
Source: The Guardian
Howard Rheingold is one of the smartest and most colourful people I’ve ever met. One of his books, Net Smart, was very useful to me while writing my thesis, and I’ve followed his work for a while now.
That’s why I’m delighted that he’s commenting on our current predicament around the technology that connects our society. He’s suggesting some ways forward — including platform co-operatives.
Part of what’s happened over the last 18 months can be attributed to us just getting used to having daily interactions with people around the world. I started doing that 20+ years ago as a teenager, so it’s difficult to imagine what that must be like if you haven’t grown up with the increasing power of connectivity.
Rick Webb points out that the view that we’d automatically be better, connected, might just be incorrect.
It’s quite possible that the premise is completely false. And I’m not sure we ever considered for a moment that it could be wrong. Source: NewCo Shift
Almost everyone has one or more account with the following companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Between them they know more about you than your family and the state apparatus of your country, combined.
However, 2018 could be the year that changes all that, all thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as this article explains.
I like the notion put forward by Susan Wu in this article — although Maslow’s framework was actually based on co-operation, so re-thinking it as a dynamic hierarchy may be all that’s required:
The problem is that Maslow’s framework pertains to individual, not societal, well-being. The reality is that individual needs cannot be met without the social cohesion of belonging, connectedness, and symbiotic networks. A revised design focused on a thriving civilization would have at its root empathy and ethics, and acknowledge that if inequality continues to grow at its current pace, societal well-being becomes impossible to achieve. Source: WIRED
This is a great post, giving an overview of lots of projects focusing on the decentralisation of technology we use everyday, as well as that which underpins it:
Photo: NASA
I cannot believe this is happening in my country as we prepare to enter 2018. Food banks and developments like these are born of political choice, not economic necessity.
More than 60 per cent of paediatricians believe food insecurity contributed to the ill health among children they treat, according to a 2017 survey by the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health.
Dr George Grimble, a medical scientist at University College London, said food poverty was “disastrous” for a child’s development, resulting in nutritional deficits, obesity and squandered potential. Source: The Independent
My kids, who are ten and six years of age respectively, blatantly don’t believe in Father Christmas. After leaving out a mince pie and glass of whisky last night, they asked this morning whether I’d enjoyed it!
As a church-going family, it’s never been a huge deal as to whether Santa Claus is literally real. Christmas isn’t really about a guy in a red suit furtively climbing down an impossible number of chimneys.
What to tell your children, and when to admit that Father Christmas doesn’t really exist, is still awkward, however. Although there’s a twinkle in my eye when I talk to them about ‘him’, I still haven’t admitted that it’s really me filling the up the stockings at the end of their bed each year.
In this article, Maria Popova quotes the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, who read her own children stories about Santa Claus legends from many different countries. The difference between ‘literal’ and ‘poetic’ truth is an important one. Especially this year. And particularly at Christmas.
There’s a perpetual joke in open source circles that next year will be ‘the year of Linux on the desktop’. GNU/Linux, of course, is an operating system that comes in a range of ‘distributions’ (I use Ubuntu and Elementary OS on a range of devices).
In this article, the author outlines 10 reasons that Linux isn’t used by more people. I think he’s spot-on:
Source: Christian F.K. Schaller
Shane Parrish from Farnam Street has written an ‘annual letter’ to his audience, much like his hero Warren Buffett. I particularly liked this section:
Tell me what you read on a regular basis and I will tell you what you likely think. Creepy? Think again. Facebook already knows more about you than your partner does. They know the words that resonate with you. They know how to frame things to get you to click. And they know the thousands of people who look at the same things online that you do.
When you’re reading something online, you’re spending time with someone. These people determine our standards, our defaults, and often our happiness.
Every year, I make a point of reflecting on how I’ve been spending my time. I ask myself who I’m spending my time with and what I’m reading, online and offline. The thread of these questions comes back to a common core: Is where I’m spending my time consistent with who I want to be? Source: Farnam Street Blog
The image I’ve chosen for this post came via social.coop rather than the article cited, but it does indicate where non-inherited wealth comes from. This wealth is then often used for investment or speculation that then becomes unearned income.
I like the way that the author frames things in terms of how much people retain, rather than how much they earn:
This article, originally given as a lecture, focuses on the worrying fact that we no longer seem to know how to disagree with one another any more. I’ve certainly witnessed this with the ‘hive mind’ on social networks, who are outraged if anyone so much as questions what keyboard warriors see as sacred tenets.
The author of this article works in finance and describes himself as “whatever the opposite of a futurist is”. He does, however, make some decent points, even though he may be a little short-sighted:
In our house, on the (very) rare occasions we’re watching live television that includes advert breaks, I mute the sound and do a humourous voice-over…
Via Audrey Watters, this is incredible. Read the whole thing; capitalism can’t, and won’t, save us:
Corporations partner with environmental non-profits. Coca-Cola launches “Arctic White for Polar Bears.” Source: Motherboard
I stumbled across this via Hacker News. This guy basically explains how consulting works, with some great advice. Here’s three parts that stood out for me:
Partly a marketing move, for sure, but this move to ethical business is encouraging. See also Buffer’s transparent salary calculator. The next move for companies like this would be for employees to be co-owners.
We don’t actually have anyone who lives in San Francisco, but now everyone is being paid as though they did. Whatever an employee pockets in the difference in cost of living between where they are and the sky-high prices in San Francisco is theirs to keep.
This is not how companies normally do their thing. I’ve been listening to Adam Smith’s 1776 classic on the Wealth of Nations, and just passed through the chapter on how the market is set by masters trying to get away with paying the least possible, and workers trying to press for the maximum possible. An antagonistic struggle, surely.
It doesn’t need to be like that. Especially in software, which is a profitable business when run with restraint and sold to businesses. Source: Signal v. Noise
I know someone who lives in London and gets weed delivered through his letterbox from the dark net with Amazon-like efficiency. So I can entirely believe this write-up:
I finally got around to reading this article after it was shared in so many places I frequent over the last couple of days. As someone who has studied Philosophy, History, and Education, I find it well-written but unremarkable. Surely we all know this… right?
Since 2013, Edward Snowden has been advising people and creating software. The Haven app he’s been working on l interesting, and given I’ve got a spare Android smartphone, I might try it in my home office!
Update: more details in an article at The Intercept
Same old Tories, defunding education and entrenching privilege:
Cathy Davidson writing about the subjects that teach the kinds of skills that employers are really looking for:
Martin Weller on how algorithms feeding on engagement draw us towards ever more radical stuff online:
